m 



§ 



4 




THE 

SERMONS, 
LECTURES, AND ADDRESSES 

DELIVERED BY 
THE VERY REV". THOMAS ST. BURKE, 

(THE JUSTLY CELEBRATED DOMINICAN PRIEST,) 

W THE PRINCIPAL CITIES OF THE UNITED STATES. 

SOLD ONLY BY SUBSCRIPTION. 

NEW YORK : 
PETER F. COLLIEB, 
23 Dey Steeet. 



Satered accord ng to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Thoma3 O'KaJ!!*., 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



Wm. McCrea & Co., Stereotypers, Newburgh, N. Y. 



PEEFACE. 



The Editor has great pleasure in presenting to the Amer- 
ican public the following noble specimens of pulpit oratory. 
For most of these splendid Sermons and Addresses he is in- 
debted to the columns of the New York Irish American, the 
proprietors of that journal having, with laudable energy and 
liberality, given faithful reports of almost every word that 
has fallen from the eloquent lips of the great Dominican 
Preacher since he has landed upon the friendly shores where 
so many of his countrymen have found prosperous and happy 
homes. 

Father Burke is one of those rare men, gifted with 
almost superhuman eloquence, whose presence among us is as 
beneficial as was that of the angel at the Pool of Siloam, 
stirring up the lethargic waters to fresh life and utility. Tha 
Rev. Thomas Burke is yet in the first flush of manhood, 
and likely, in the ordinary course of mundane affairs, to be 
spared to us for very many years. His personal appearance, 
no less than his vast classical and scientific attainments, 
admirably adapt him for the great profession to which he has 
devoted his life. His physical organization is something 
truly marvellous ; the jewels of the mind, in this instance, 
are worthily encased. No subject comes amiss to this great 
orator, who, meanwhile, is as modest as he is learned and 
eloquent. He can discourse with transcendant ability and 



IT 



PEEFACE. 



power, hour after hour, upon almost every subject. But 
upon three subjects he never tires of dwelling — his Religion, 
his Church, and his Country. The following lines of the 
Great Poet most fittingly apply to Father Thomas Btjeke : — 

" Hear him but reason in divinity, 
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish 
You would desire that he were made a prelate : 
Hear him debate of Commonwealth affairs, 
You would say, — it hatli been all-in-all his study : 
List his discourse of war, and you shall hear 
A fearful battle rendered you in music : 
Turn him to any cause of policy 
The Gordion knot of it he will unloose, 
Familiar as his garter ; that when he speaks, 
The air, a chartered libertine, is still, 
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears, 
To steal his sweet and honied sentences." 

H. L, W. 



CONTENTS. 



PASS 

Funeral Oration on O'Connell . .... 3 

The Catholic Church the Mother of Liberty ... 15 
The Church, the Mother and Inspiration of Art . . . .36 

Address to the Knights of St. Patrick 55 

The Groupings of Calvary. ... .64 

Christ on Calvary . . . ... 80 

Address to the Members of the " Galway Club " 101 
The History of Ireland, as Told in Her Ruins .... 104 

The Peace of God . ..... . 133 

The Catholic Church the Salvation of Society . . 145 

Consecration of Bishop Hendricken 166 

The Catholic Church the True Emancipator . - • . . 174 

The Confessional: Its Effect on Society 192 

The Life and Times of O'Connell 211 

The Promises of Christ Fulfilled Only in the Catholic Church . 230 
Address to the Catholic Temperance Union of New Jersey . . 250 
The Pope's Tiara— Its Past, Present, and Future . . 252 



CONTENTS. 



PACtB 

The Immaculate Conception . . . . . . . . 273 

The Blessed Eucharist 287 

The National Music of Ireland ....... S04 

Tfie Irish People in their Relation to Catholicity . . . . 329 

The Catholic Church and the Wants of Society .... 350 

Christian Charity 374 

The Divine Commission of the Church 389 

The Catholic Church the True Regenerator of Society . . 399 
The Faith of Ireland— The Triumph of this Century . . . 418 
The Future of the Irish Race in America ... . 421 

St. Patrick 428 

The Month of Mary 437 

The Pope: and the Crown which He Wears . ... 448 

The Exiles of Erin 468 

The Resurrection 490 



THE KEY. FATHER BURKE'S 



FUNERAL ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 



A MAGNTFICENT DISCOUESE. 



Previous to giving the reader the magnificent Addresses, — Religious 
and Secular, — delivered by the learned and eloquent Father Burke, 
on this Continent, we introduce the following heart-moving and instruc- 
tive address, delivered upon the occasion of the removal of the earthly 
remains of the Great Liberator to their last resting-place, under the 
grand Round Tower, at Glasnevin ; — a most appropriate monument, 
raised by a grateful country to one of the ablest and purest champions 
that ever carried the banner of real Liberty. It is computed that over 
fifty thousand persons stood around the grave of the matchless 
O'Connell, on the august occasion. 



" Wisdom conducted the just man through the right ways, and 
Bhowed him the kingdom of God, made him honorable in his labors, 
and accomplished his works. She kept him safe from his enemies, and 
gave him a strong conflict, that he might overcome ; and in bondage 
she left him not till she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom, and 
power against those that oppressed him, and gave him everlasting 
glory." — Wisdom x. 

These striking words of the inspired writer tell us 
the glorious history of a great man of old, the father and 
founder of a great people. They also point out the true 
source of his greatness, and the secret of his success. He 
was a just man, and the spirit of wisdom was upon him. 
He was led by this spirit through the right ways — that 
is to say, the ways of truth and justice, the straightfor- 
ward paths of reason and obedience ; and the ends of his 
ways, the object ever before his eyes, was the ' 'kingdom 
of God," the independence, the glory, the spiritual freedom 
of the children of his race. A high and holy object 



4 



FUNERAL ORATION ON O'cONNELL. 



was tLis, a grand and a noble purpose, which wisdom 
held out to him as the aim of his life and the crown of his 
days. And as the end for which a man labors determines all 
things, either unto shame or unto glory, so he, who labored 
for so great an end, " the kingdom of God," was made " hon- 
orable in his labors;" and the source of this honor was also 
the secret of success, for he "accomplished his works." But, 
in the midst of these "honorable labors," the inspired writer 
tells that the just man's path was beset by enemies, but the 
spirit of wisdom, which guided him, " kept him safe from his 
enemies," enabled him to meet their violence and their wiles, 
their open hatred and their subtle cunning, to overcome them, 
and to baffle them. The contest was long ; it was " a strong 
conflict," which was given to him only that he might over- 
come, and so be worthy to be crowned. He was made to 
taste of sorrow ; his enemies seemed to prevail ; but in bands 
the spirit of wisdom, truth and justice forsook him not, " till 
she brought him the sceptre of the kingdom," the love and 
veneration of his brethren and of his people, and " power 
against those that oppressed him," the power of principle and 
of justice; and so changed his sorrow into joy, " and gave 
him everlasting glory " — glory on the earth, in the history 
and traditions of his people, where his name was in honor and 
benediction, and his memory enshrined in their love, and the 
higher glory, the everlasting glory "of the kingdom of God," 
for which he had labored so honorably, so successfully, and so 
long. Now, all this honor, triumph, and everlasting glory 
came to the great Israelite through the spirit of wisdom, the 
same spirit, of which it is written elsewhere, " that it can do 
all things, * * * that it removeth all things, * * * 
and, through nations, conveyeth itself into holy souls, and 
maketh the friends of God and the prophets " — " the friends 
of God," that is to say, the defenders of His Church and of 
His faith ; and " prophets," that is, the leaders of His people. 
The destinies of nations are in the hands of God, and when 
the hour of His mercy comes, and a nation is to regain the 
first of its rights, the free exercise of its faith and religion, 
God who is never wanting to his own designs, ever provides 
for that hour a leader for his people, such a one as my text 
describes — wise, high-minded, seeking the kingdom of God, 
honorable in his labors, strong in conflict with his enemies, 
triumphant in the issue and crowned with glory. Nor was 
Ireland forgotten in the designs of God. Centuries of patient 
endurance brought at length the dawn of a better day. God's 
hour came, and it brought with it Ireland's greatest son, 



FUNERAL O RATION ON O'CONNELL. 



5 



Daniel O'Connell. We surround his grave to-day to pay 
him a last tribute of love, to speak words of praise, of suffrage 
and of prayer. For two and twenty years has he silently 
slept in the midst of us. His generation is passing away, ana 
the light of history already dawns upon his grave, and she 
speaks his name with cold, unimpassioned voice. In this age 
of ours a few years are as a century of times gone by. Great 
changes and startling events follow each other in such quick 
succession that the greatest names are forgotten almost as 
soon as those who bore them disappear, and the world itself 
is surprised to find how short-lived is the fame which promised 
to be immortal. He who is inscribed even in the golden book 
ol the world's annals finds that he has but written his name 
uj^on water. The Church alone is the true shrine of immor- 
tality, the temple of fame which perisheth not : and that man 
only whose name and memory is preserved in her sanctuaries 
receives on this earth a reflection of that glory which is eter- 
nal in Heaven. Bat before the Church will crown any one of 
her children, she carefully examines his claims to the immor- 
tality of her gratitude and praise — she asks, " What has he 
done for God and for man ?" This great question am I come 
here to answer to-day for him whose tongue, once so eloquent, 
is now stilled in the silence of the grave, and over whoso 
tomb a grateful country has raised a monument of its ancient 
faith and a record of its past glories ; and I claim for him 
the meed of our gratitude and love, in that he was a man of 
faith, whom wisdom guided in " the right ways," who loved 
and sought " the kingdom of God," who was most " honora- 
ble in his labors," and who accomplished his " great works 
the liberator of his race, the father of his people, the con- 
queror in " the undefiled conflict" of principle, truth, aud jus- 
tice. No man of our day denies that Ireland has been a most 
afflicted country ; but seldom was her dark hour darker, or 
her affliction greater, than towards the close of the last cen- 
tury. The nation's heart seemed broken, and all her hopes 
extinguished. The Catholics of Ireland were barely allowed 
to live, and were expected to be grateful even for the boon of 
existence: but the profession of the Catholic faith was a com- 
plete bar and an insurmountable article to all advancement 
in the path of wordly advantage, honor, dignity, and even 
wealth. The fetters of conscience hung heavily also upon 
genius, and every prize to which lawful ambition might aspire 
was beyond the reaeh of those who refused to deny the relig- 
ion of their fathers, and to forget their country. Among the 
victims of this religious and intellectual slavery was one who 



6 



FUNEEA.L ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 



was marked among the youth of his time. Of birth which w 
other lands would be called noble, gifted with a powerful and 
comprehensive intelligence, a prodigious memory, a most fer- 
tile imagination, pouring forth its images in a vein of richest 
oratory, a generous spirit, a most tender heart, enriched with 
stores of varied learning, and genius of the highest kind, 
graced with every form of manly beauty, strength, and 
vigor; of powerful frame — nothing seemed wanting to 
aim — 

" A combination and a form indeed 

Where every god did seem to set his seal, 

To give the world assurance of a man * 

yet all seemed to be lost in him, for he was born a Catholic 
and an Irishman. Before him now stretched, full and broad, 
the two ways of life, and he must choose between them ; the 
way which led to all that the world prized — wealth, power, 
distinction, title, glory, and fame ; the way of genius, the no- 
ble rivalry of intellect, the association with all that was most 
refined and refining — the way which led up to the council 
chambers of the nation, to all places of jurisdiction and of 
honor, to the temples wherein were enshrined historic names 
and glorious memories, to share in all blessings of privilege 
and freedom. The stirrings of genius, the promptings of 
youthful ambition, the consciousness of vast intellectual power, 
which placed within his easy grasp the highest prizes to which 
" the last infirmity of noble minds " could aspire — all this im- 
pelled him to enter upon the bright and golden path. But 
before him opened another way. No gleam of sunshine illu- 
mined this way; it was wet with tears — it was overshadowed 
by misfortune — it was pointed out to the young traveller of life 
by the sign of the cross, and he who entered it was bidden to 
leave all hope behind him, for it led through the valley of hu- 
miliation into the heart of a fallen race and an enslaved and 
afflicted people. I claim for O'Connell the glory of having 
chosen the latter path, and this claim no man can gainsay, for 
it is the argument of the apostle in favor of the great law- 
giver of old — " By faith Moses denied himself to be the son 
of Pharoah's daughter; rather choosing to be afflicted with 
the people of God than to have the pleasure of sin for a time 
— esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the 
treasure of the Egyptians." In this way was he led by his 
love for his religion and for his country. He firmly believed 
in that religion in which he was born. He had that faith 
which is common to all Catholics, and which is not merely a 



FTTN-EEAL ORATION" ON O'CONNELL. 1 

strong opinion, or even a conviction, but an absolute and most 
certain knowledge that the Catholic Church is the one and 
only true messenger and witness of God upon the earth; that 
to belong to her communion and to possess her faith is the first 
and greatest of all endowments and privileges, before which 
everything else sinks into absolute nothing. He believed and 
knew that it was not enough for him to " believe in his heart 
unto justice," but that he must " confess with his mouth unto 
salvation," and the strength of his faith left him no alterna- 
tive but to proclaim loudly his religion, and to cast in his lot 
with his people. That religion was this people's only inherit- 
ance. They had clung to it and preserved it with a love and 
fidelity altogether superhuman, and which was the wonder of 
the world. The teaching of the Catholic Church was ac- 
cepted cheerfully by the Irish people when it was first preached 
to them. They took it kindly and at once from the lips of 
their apostle, and Ireland was a grand exception to all 
the nations, where the seed of Christianity has ever been 
the martyr's blood. The faith thus delivered to them 
they so illustrated by their sanctity that for a thousand 
years Catholic Ireland was the glory of Christendom, and 
received among the nations the singular title of the " Island 
of Saints." 

Our national history begins with our faith, and is so inter- 
woven with our holy religion, that if you separate these, our 
country's name disappears from the world's annals ; while, 
on the other hand, Christian and Catholic, which means Ire- 
land holy, Ireland evangelizing, Ireland teaching the nations 
of Europe, Ireland upholding in every land the Cross and 
the crown, Ireland suffering for her faith as people never suf- 
fered, has her name written in letters of gold upon the proud- 
est page of history. Ireland and her religion were so singu- 
larly bound together, that in days of prosperity and peace 
they shone together ; in days of sorrow and shame they sus- 
tained one another. When the ancient religion was driven 
from her sanctuaries, she still found a temple in every cabin 
in the land, an altar — -a home in the heart of every Irishman. 
When the war of conquest degenerated into a war of exter- 
mination, the faith, and the faith alone, became to the Irish 
race the principle of their vitality, and national existence, the 
only element of freedom and of hope. To their Church, suf- 
fering and proscribed, they remained faithful as in the days 
of her glory. Their Catholic religion became the strongest 
passion of their lives, and in their love for their great suffering 
mother, they say to her : 



V 



8 FUNERAL ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 

" Through grief and through danger thy smile hath cheer'd my way, 

Till hope seem'd to bud from each thorn that round me lay ; 

The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn'd, 

Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turn'd ; 

Yes, slave as I was, in thy arms my spirit felt free, 

And blessed even the sorrows that made me more dear to thee." 



All this O'Connell felt and knew. He was Irish of the Irish, 
and Catholic of the Catholic. His love for religion and 
country was the breath of his nostrils, the blood of his veins ; 
and when he brought to the service of both the strength of 
his faith and the power of his genius, with the instinct of a 
true Irishman, his first thought was to lift up the nation by 
striking the chains off the national Church. And here again, 
my brethren, two ways opened before him. One was a way 
in which many had trodden in former times, many pure, and 
high-minded, noble and patriotic men ; it was a way of dan- 
ger and of blood, and the history of his country told him that 
it ever ended in defeat, and in greater evil. The sad events 
which he himself witnessed, and which took place around him, 
warned him off that way ; for he saw that the effort to walk 
in it had swept away the last vestige of Ireland's national leg- 
islature and independence. But another path was still open 
to him, and wisdom pointed it out as "the right way." 
Another battle-field lay before him, on which he could " fight 
the good fight," and vindicate all the rights of his religion 
and of his country. The armory was furnished him by the 
inspired Apostle when he said : " Brethren, our wrestling is 
not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and 
powers * * * * Therefore take unto you the 
armor of God * * * Having your loins girt about 
with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, and your 
feet shod with the preparation of tfa^ Gospel of Peace, in all 
things taking the shield of faith. * * * And take unto 
you the sword of the spirit, which is the Word." O'Connell 
knew well that such weapons in such a hand as his were 
irresistible — that, girt round with the truth and justice of his 
cause, he was clad in the armor of the Eternal God ; that, with 
word of peace and order on his lips, with the strong shield of 
faith before him, and the sword of eloquent speech in his hand, 
with the war-cry of obedience, principle, and law, no power 
on earth could resist bim. 



" Such a battle once begun 
Tho' baffled oft, is ever won." 



FUNEKAL OEATION ON O'CONNELL. 



9 



For it is the battle of God, and nothing can resist the 
Most High. Accordingly, he raised the standard of the new 
war, and unfurled the banner on which was written, — free- 
dom to be achieved by the power of truth, the cry of justice, 
the assertion of right, and the omnipotence of the law. 
Religious liberty and perfect equality was his first demand. 
The new apostle of freedom went through the length and 
breadth of Ireland. His eloquent words revived the hopes, 
and stirred up the energies of the nation; the people and 
their priesthood rallied around him as one man ; they 
became most formidable to their enemies by the might of 
justice and reason, and they showed themselves worthy of 
liberty by their respect for the law. Never was Ireland 
more excited, yet never was Ireland more peaceful. The 
people were determined on gaining their religious freedom. 
Irishmen, from 1822 to 1829, were as fiercely determined, 
on their new battlefield, as they had been in the breaches of 
Limerick or on the slopes of Fontenoy. They were marshal- 
led by a leader as brave as Sarsfield and as daring as Red 
Hugh. He led them against the strongest citadel in the 
world; and even as the walls of the city of old crumbled 
to the dust at the sound of Israel's trumpets, so, at the sound 
of his mighty voice, who spoke in the name of a united peo- 
ple, " the lintels of the doors were moved," and the gates 
were opened which three hundred years of prejudice and 
pride had closed and barred against our people. The first 
decree of our liberation went forth on the 13th of April, 
1829. Catholic Emancipation was proclaimed, and seven 
millions of Catholic Irishmen entered the nation's legisla- 
ture in the person of O'Connell. It was the first and the 
greatest victory of peaceful principle which our age has 
witnessed, the grandest triumph of justice and truth, the 
most glorious victory of the genius of one man, and the first 
great act of homage which Ireland's rulers paid to the relig- 
ion of the people, and which Ireland's people paid to the 
great principles of peaceful agitation. 

O'Connell's first and greatest triumph was the result of 
his strong faith and his ardent zeal for his religion and his 
Church. The Church was to him, as it is to us, " the king- 
dom of God; " and in his labors for it, "he was made honora- 
ble," and received from a grateful people the grandest title 
ever given to man. Ireland called him " the Liberator." He 
was "honorable in his labors," when we consider the end 
which he proposed to himself. It was no selfish nor even 
purely human end which he put before him. He devoted him- 
1* 



10 



FUNERAL ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 



self, his time, his talents, his energies, his power, to the glor^f 
of God, to the liberation of God's Church, to the emancipa- 
tion of his people. This was the glorious end ; nor were the 
means Less honorable. Fair, open, manly self-assertion; high 
solemn appeal to eternal principles; noble and unceasing proc- 
lamation of rights founded in justice and in the constitution; 
peaceful but most powerful pressure of a people united by his 
genius, inflamed, by his eloquence, and guided by his vast 
knowledge and wisdom — these were the honorable means by 
which he accomplished his great work, and this great work 
was the achievement which gained for him not only the title 
of Liberator of Ireland, but even the oecumenical title of the 
Liberator of Christ's Church. "Were it only to Ireland," 
says the great Lacordaire, " that Emancipation has been pro- 
fitable, where is the man in the Church who has freed at once 
seven millions of souls ? Challenge your recollection — search 
history from that first and famous edict which granted to the 
Christians liberty of conscience; and see if there are to be 
found many such acts comparable by the extent of their ef- 
fects with that of Catholic Emancipation ! Seven millions of 
souls are now free to serve and love God even to the end of 
time; and each time that this people, advancing in their ex- 
istence and their liberty, shall recall to memory the aspect of 
the man who studied the secret of their ways, they will ever 
find inscribed the name of O'Connell, both on the latest pages 
of their servitude and on first of their regeneration." His 
glorious victory did honor even to those whom he vanquished. 
He honored them by appealing to their sense of justice and 
of right; and in the act of Catholic Emancipation, England 
acknowledged the power of a people, not asking for mercy, 
but clamoring for the liberty of the soul, the blessing which 
was born with Christ, and which is the inheritance of the na- 
tions that embrace the Cross. Catholic Emancipation was 
but the herald and the beginning of victories. He who was 
the Church's liberator and most true son, was also the first 
of Ireland's statesmen and patriots. 

Our people remember well, as their future historian will 
faithfully record, the many trials borne for them, the many 
victories gained in their cause, the great life devoted to them 
by O'Connell. Lying, however, at the foot of the altar, as 
he is to-day, while the Church hallows his grave with prayer 
and sacrifice, it is more especially as the Catholic Emancipa- 
tor of his people that we place a garland on his tomb. It is 
as a child of the Church that we honor him, and recall with 
tears of sorrow our recollections of the aged man, revered, be- 



FUNERAL ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 



1. 



loved, whom all the glory of the world's admiration and the 
nation's love had never lifted up in soul out of the holy at- 
mosphere of Christian humility and simplicity. Obedience 
to the Church's laws, quick zeal for her honor and the dignity 
of her worship ; a spirit of penance, refining while it expiated, 
chastening while it ennobled, all that was natural in the 
man ; constant and frequent use of the Church's holy sacra- 
ments, which shed the halo of grace round his venerated 
head — these were the last grand lessons which he left to his 
people, and thus did the sun of his life set in the glory of 
Christian holiness. For Ireland he lived, for Ireland did he 
die. The people whom he had so faithfully served, whom he 
loved with a love second only to his love for God, were deci- 
mated by a visitation the most terrible that the world ever 
witnessed ; the nations of the earth trembled, and men grew 
pale at the sight of Ireland's desolation. Her tale of famine, 
of misery, of death, was told in every land. Her people fled 
affrighted from the soil which had forgotten its ancient bounty, 
or died, their white lips uttering the last faint cry for bread. 
All this the aged father of his country beheld. Neither his 
genius, nor his eloquence, nor his love, could now save his 
people ; and the spirit was crushed which had borne him 
triumphantly through all dangers and toil ; the heart broke 
within him, that brave and generous heart which had never 
known fear, and whose ruling passion was love for Ireland. 
The martyred spirit, the broken heart of the great Irishman 
led him to the holiest spot of earth, and with tottering steps 
he turned to Rome. The man whose terrible voice in life 
shook the highest tribunals of earth in imperious demand for 
justice to Ireland now sought the Apostle's tomb, that, from 
that threshold of heaven he might put up a cry for mercy to 
his country and his people, and offer up his life for his native 
land. Like the Prophet King, he would fain stand between 
the people and the angel who smote them, and offer himself 
a victim and a holocaust for the land which he loved. But 
on the shores of the Mediterranean the weary traveller lay 
down to die. At that last moment, his profound knowledge 
of his country's history may have given him that prophetic 
glimpse of the future which is sometimes vouchsafed to great 
mind"; He had led a mighty nation to the opening of " the 
right way," and directed her first and doubtful steps in the 
path of conciliation and justice to Ireland. Time, whichever 
works out the designs of God, has carried that nation forward 
in the glorious way. With firmer step, with undaunted soul, 
with high resolve of justice, peace, and conciliation, the work 



12 



FUNERAL ORATION ON O'CONNELL. 



begun by Ireland's Liberator progresses in our day. Chains 
are being forged for our country, but they are chains of gold, 
to bind up all discordant elements in the empire, so that all 
men shall dwell together as brothers in the land. If we can- 
not have the blessings of religious unity so as " to be all of 
one mind," we shall have " the next dearest blessing that 
heaven can give," the peace that springs from perfect relig- 
ious liberty and equality. 

All this do we owe to the man whose memory we recall 
to-day, to the principles which he taught us, which illustrate 
his life, and which, in the triumph of Catholic Emancipation, 
pointed out to the Irish people the true secret of their 
strength, the true way of progress, and the sure road to vic- 
tory. The seed which his hand had sown it was not given 
to him to reap in its fulness. Catholic Emancipation was 
the first instalment of liberty. The edifice of religious free- 
dom was to be crowned when the wise architect who had laid 
its foundations and built up the walls was in his grave. Let 
us hope that his dying eyes were cheered and the burden of 
his last hour lightened by the sight of the perfect grandeur 
of his work — that like the Prophet lawgiver, he beheld " all 
the land;" — that he saw it with his eyes, though he did not 
" pass over to it ;" and that it was given to him to " salute 
from afar off" the brightness of the day which he was never to 
enjoy. The dream of his life is being realized to-day. He 
had ever sighed to be able to extend to his Protestant fellow- 
countrymen the hand of perfect friendship, which only exists 
where there is perfect equality, and to enter with them into 
the compact of the true peace which is founded in justice. 
Time, which buries in utter oblivion so many names and so 
many memories, will exalt him in his work. The day has 
already dawned and is ripening to its perfect noon, when Irish- 
men of every creed will remember O'Connell, and celebrate 
him as the common friend and the greatest benefactor of 
their country. What man is there, even of those whom our 
age has called great, whose name, so many years after his 
death could summon so many loving hearts around his tomb ? 
We, to-day, are the representatives not only of a nation but 
of a race. " Quwnam regio hi terris nostri non plena 
laboris f " Where is the land that has not seen the face of 
our people and heard their voice ? — and wherever, even to the 
ends of the earth, an Irishman is found to-day, his spirit and 
his sympathy are here. The millions of America are with 
us — the Irish Catholic soldier on India's plains is present 
among us by the magic of love ; the Irish sailor, standing 



FUNERAL OEATIOTST OX O oOlN is am, 



15 



by the wheel this moment in far-off silent seas, where it is 
night, and the southern stars are shining, joins his prayer 
with ours, and recalls the glorious image and the venerated 
name of O'Connell. 

w He is gone who seemed so great — 

Gone : but nothing can bereave him 

Of the force he made his own, 

Being here ; and we believe him 

Something far advanced in state, 
And that he wears a truer crown 
Than anj wreath that man can weave him." 

He is gone, but his fame shall live for ever on the earth as a 
lover of God and of his people. Adversaries, political and 
religious, he had many, and like a 

" Tower of strength 
Which stood full square to all the winds that blew/' 

the Hercules of justice and of liberty stood up against them. 
Time, which touches all things with mellowing hand, has soft- 
ened the recollections of past contests, and they who once 
looked upon him as a foe, now only remember the glory of the 
fight, and the mighty genius of him who stood forth the rep- 
resentative man of his race, and the champion of his people. 
They acknowledge his greatness, and they join hands with 
us to weave the garland of his fame. But far other, higher 
and holier are the feelings of Irish Catholics all the world 
over to-day. They recognize, in the dust which we are assem- 
bled to honor, the powerful arm which promoted them, the 
eloquent tongue which proclaimed their rights and asserted 
their freedom, the strong hand which, like that of the Macca- 
bee of old, first struck off their chains, and then built up their 
holy altars. They, mingling the supplication of prayer and 
the gratitude of suffrage, with their tears, recall — oh, with how 
much love ! — the memory of him who was a Joseph to Israel 
—their tower of strength, their buckler, and their shield — 
who shed around their homes, their altars, and their graves 
the sacred light of religious liberty, and the glory of unfet- 
tered worship. " His praise is in the Church," and this is the 
surest pledge of the immortality of his glory. "A people's 
voice" may be "the proof and echo of all human fame," but 
the voice of the undying Church is the echo of " everlasting 
glory," and when those who surround his grave to-day shall 
have passed away, all future generations of Irishmen to 
the end of time will be reminded of his name and of his 
glory. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



j A Lecture delivered in "St. Paul's Church, Brooklyn, on Sunday 
evening, March 3d, by the Rev Father Burke.] 

" THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE MOTHER OF LIBERTY." 



My F-riexds : On last Tuesday evening, when I had the 
honor of addressing you, I proposed to you a subject for your 
consideration v^hich perhaps may have struck a good many 
among you as strange. We are such worshippers of this 
age of ours, that when the "man of the day," as he is 
called, is put before us in any other than an amiable light, 
no matter how true it may be, it seems strange, and it is a 
hazardous thing for me to attempt. And there are many 
among you that will consider the thing I have under- 
taken to do this evening — a still more hazardous attempt — 
namely, to prove to you that the Catholic Church is the 
foster-mother of human liberty. Was there ever so strange 
a proposition heard — the Catholic Church the mother of 
human liberty ! If I undertook to prove that the Catholic 
Church was the instrument chosen by Almighty God to save 
Christianity, I might do it on the testimony of Protestant 
historians. I mig-ht quote, for instance, Guizot, the French 
statesman and historian, who repeatedly and emphatically 
asserts that only for the organization of bishops, priests, 
monks, etc., — what is called " the Church," — the Christian 
religion would never have been preserved : rever have been 
able to sustain the shock of the incursions of the barbarians 
of the North upon the Roman Empire : and never have been 
preserved through the following ages of confusion, and, some 
people say, darkness. I could quote the great German his- 
torian, Meander, who was not only a Protestant, but bitterly 
opposed to the Catholic Church, who repeats, again and 
again, the self-same proposition. "Were it not," said he, 
" for the Church, the Christian religion must have perished 



16 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



during the time that elapsed between the fifth and the tenth 
centuries." I might, I say again, find it easy to prove any 
one of these propositions, with less fear of cavil. Ah, but 
this is quite another thing, you will say in your own minds. 
This man tells us that he is prepared to prove that the Catho- 
lic Church is the foster-mother of human liberty. Why, the 
" man of the day," whom we were considering on a previous 
evening, is not a very amiable character. He has a great 
many vices : there are a great many moral deformities about 
him— this boasted man of the nineteenth century. But 
there is one thing that he lays claim to : he says — and he 
says it is something which no man can gainsay at least in 
this : that he is a free man ; that he is not like those men 
who lived in the ages when the Catholic Church had power : 
when she was enabled to enforce her laws. " Then, indeed," 
he says, " men were slaves, but now, whatever our faults may 
be, we have freedom. Nay, more, we will add, we have free- 
dom in spite of the Catholic Charch. We are free because we 
have succeeded in disarming the Catholic Church ; in taking 
the power out of her hands. We are free because our legisla- 
tion and the spirit of our age is hostile to the Catholic Church. 
How then, Monk, do you presume to come here and tell us, 
the men of the day, that this Church of yours — this Church 
whose very name we associate with the idea of intellectual 
slavery — that she is the foster-mother of human liberty ? " 
Well, I need not tell you, my friends, that there is nothing 
easier than to make assertions ; that there is nothing easier 
thau to proclaim such and such things, laid down as if they 
were the law — tumble it out as if it was Gospel. It may be 
a lie. Out with it. Assert it strongly. Repeat it. Don't 
let it be put down. Assert it again and again. Even though 
it be a lie, yet a great many people will believe it. Nothing 
is easier than to make assertions without thinking well on 
what we say. Now, let me ask you, this evening, to do what 
very few men in this age of ours do at all ; and that is, to 
reflect a little. It is simply astonishing, considering the 
powers that God has given to man — the power of thought, 
the power of reflection, the power of analyzing facts and 
weighing statements, the power of reducing things to theii 
first principles — I say it is astonishing to think of that 
and to look around us and see how few the men are who 
reason at all, — who reflect, — who take time for thought ; 
how many there are who use words of which they do not 
.know the meaning. Take, for instance, that word "liberty." 
I need hardly tell you that I must explain it to you before I 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



11 



advance the proposition that the Catholic Chmch is the 
mother of Liberty. 

What is the meaning of the word " Liberty" — so dear to 
ns all? We are always boasting of it ; the patriot is always 
aspiring to it; the revolutionist makes it justify all his wiles 
and all his conspiracies. It is the word that floats upon the 
glorious folds of their banners as they are flung out upon the 
breeze over the soldier's head ; and he is cheered in his last, 
moment, by the sacred sound of liberty ! It is a word dear to 
us all — the boast of us. What is the boast of America? 
That it is the Land of Freedom. Yes ; but I ask you, do you 
know what it means ? Liberty? Just reflect upon it a little. 
Does liberty mean freedom from restraint ? Does liberty, in 
your mind, mean freedom from any power, government 
restraint of legislation ? Is this your meaning of liberty ? 
For instance : Is this your meaning of liberty — that every 
man can do what he likes ? If so, you cannot complain if you 
are stopped by the robber on the roadside, and he puts his 
pistol to your head and says : "Your money or your life! " 
you cannot complain ; he is only using his liberty in doing 
what he likes. Does liberty mean that the murderer may 
come and put his knife in you ? Does liberty mean that the 
dishonest man is to be allowed to pilfer ? Is this liberty ? 
This is freedom from restraint. But is it liberty ? Most cer- 
tainly not. You will not consider that you are slaves be- 
cause you live under laws that tell you that you must not 
steal ; that you must not murder ; that you must not interfere 
with or violate each other's rights ; but that you must respect 
those of each other and if you don't do that you must be 
punished. You don't consider you are slaves because you 
are under the restraint of law. Whatever liberty means, 
therefore, it does not, in its true meaning, imply simple and 
mere freedom from restraint. Yet, how many there are who 
use this word, and who attach this meaning to it. What is 
liberty ? There are in man — in the soul of man — two great 
powers, — God-like, angelic, spiritual, — viz. : the intelligence 
of the mind and the will. The intelligence of the human 
mind, the soul, and the will are the true fountains and the 
seat of liberty. What is the freedom of the intelligence ? 
What is the freedom of the will? There are no other powers 
in man capable of this freedom except these two. If you ask 
me in what does the freedom of the intelligence and of the 
will of man consist, I answer the freedom of the intellect con- 
sists in being free from error — from intellectual error. The 
freedom of man's intelligence consists in its being perfectly 



18 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



free from the dangers and liability of believing that which 
is false. The slavery of the intelligence in man is submission 
in mind and in belief to that which is a lie. If, for instance, 
I came here this evening, and if, by the power of language, 
by plausibility of words, by persuasiveness, I got any man 
among you to believe a lie, and take that lie as truth and 
admit it into his mind as truth, and admit it as a principle 
that is right, and just, and true, when it is false and unjust 
and a lie — that man is intellectually a slave. Falsehood is 
the slavery of the intelligence. Reflect a little upon this. 
It is well worth reflecting upon. It is a truth that is not 
grasped or held by the men of this century of ours. There 
was a time when it was considered a disreputable thing to 
believe a lie. There was a time when men were ashamed of 
believing what, even by possibility, could be a lie. Nowa- 
days, men glory in it. It was but a short time ago a popular 
orator and lecturer in England, speaking of the multitude of 
religious sects that are there — speaking of those who assert 
that Christ is God, and of those who assert that He is not 
God ; — of those who assert that there are three persons in the 
Trinity, and of those who assert that there is no Trinity — the 
Unitarians ; — of those who assert that good works are neces- 
sary for salvation, and of those who assert that good works 
are not necessary at all ; — of those who assert that Christ is 
present on the altar, and of those who say it is damnable 
heresy to assert that He is there at all ; — speaking of all 
these, — how, we ask, can any one of them be true and all 
the rest not be false ? He said : "The multitude of sects and 
churches in England is the glory of our age and of our peo- 
ple, for it shows what a religious people we are." My God ! 
A man believes a lie ; a man takes a lie to him as if it were 
the truth of God ; a man takes an intellectual falsehood — a 
thing that's false in itself — a thing that has no real existence 
in fact — a thing that God never said, and never thought of 
saying ; and he lays that religious lie upon the altar of his 
soul, and he bows down and does homage to it as if it were 
the truth ! And then he comes out and says : "It may be 
a lie ; but you know it is a religious lie ; and it is so respecta- 
ble and religious to have a multitude of sects, and it shows 
what a good people we are!" This is our age. The ^ery 
definition of the freedom and intelligence of man which I am 
about to give you, I take from the highest authority. I will 
not quote for you, my friends, the words of man, but I will 
quote to you the Word of God — of God himself — who ought 
to know best ; of God himself, who made man and gave him 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION, 



his intelligence and his freedom — of God himself, who has 
declared that the freedom of the human intellect lies in the 
possession of the truth — the knowledge of the truth — the 
grasping of the truth — the exclusion, by that very fact, of a 1 ! 
error. 

Christ, our Lord, said : " You shall know the truth and 
the truth shall make you free ." You shall know the truth, 
and, in the knowledge of that truth, will lie your freedom. 
Mind you, He did not say : "I will send you groping after 
the truth." No ! But you shall know it — you shall have it 
— no doubt about it ! He did not say — " Here is a book ; 
here is my word ; take it and look for the truth in it : and if 
you happen to find it, well and good ; if not, you are a relig- 
ions man ! " He did not say : " Your duty is to seek for 
the truth ; to look for it" — no ; but He said : "You shall 
have it, and you shall know it ; and that shall make your free- 
dom ; and the truth shall make you free ! " I lay it down, 
therefore, as a first principle, that the very definition of intel- 
lectual freedom lies in the possession of the truth. 

Now, my friends, before I go any further, I may as well 
at once come home to my subject, and that is, that " The 
Catholic Church alone, is the foster-mother of intellectual 
freedom." Afterwards we will come to the freedom of the 
will. We will ask what it is, and apply the same principles 
in answering it. There is in the Catholic Church a power 
which she has always exercised ; and strange to say, it is the 
very exercise of that power which forms the world's chief 
accusation against her. And that is, the power of defining, 
as articles of faith and dogma — as to what we are to believe 
beyond all doubt, all cavil, beyond all speculation, what she 
holds and knows to be true. There is this distinguishing 
feature between the Catholic Church and all sectaries that 
call themselves religious — Quakers and Shakers, and ranters 
and jumpers, and all sorts of religions — there is this differ- 
ence between the Catholic Church and these off-shoots — all 
these suckers of Christianity — that she always speaks clearly. 
Every child that belongs to her, every man that hears her 
voice, knows precisely what to believe, knows precisely what 
the Church teaches. Never does she leave a soul in doubt. 
Sometime ago a deputation of clergymen of the Church of 
England waited upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
propounded a very simple question indeed, to him : viz. — 
Whether the Protestant Church allowed its ministers, or 
taught them to preach their sermons, with surplices on, or 
without. Well, there wasn't much in that: about half a 



20 



THE CATHOLIC MIS&ION". 



yard of calico was all of it ; the most of it was not as mucli 
as would make a surplice for a little boy. They came and 
asked the Archbishop if he would kindly tell them what 
was the discipline of the Church. The Archbishop knew 
and remembered very well that there was a party in England 
that could not bear to see a surplice on a clergyman. The 
very sight of such a thing, is like the shaking of a red rag 
before a bull ; it makes them mad. It is a singular thing. 
Now, when you come in here to your devotions, you do not 
mind much whether the alb the priest wears be a long one 
or a short one ; whether the surplice be plain or embroid- 
ered ; or whether the fringes of the lace are long or short. 
But in the Protestant Church in England, if a minister goes 
up before a certain congregation with a surplice on, one half 
of them stand up and walk out of the house. The Arch- 
bishop knew this ; he also knew that there is a strong party 
in the Protestant Church who not only favor surplices, but 
would like to see all kinds of vestments worn. Mournfully 
he turns round, and what is the answer that he gives ? He 
answers them as if he had nothing to say : as if there was 
nothing in it (laughter). What was the answer his Grace of 
Canterbury gave ? What answer do you suppose he gave 
them? He rubbed his hands — (I don't know whether he 
took a pinch of snuff or not) — but he rubbed his hands and 
said : It was — a — really — a — a — a — very — serious question ; 
that we lived in times when the Church uses a caution and 
prudence that was most admirable and most necessary ; — 
that the fact of it is, that those who wear surplices in per- 
forming the functions of the Church, — that, no doubt, they 
were actuated by the purest of motives and the best of 
feelings ; that he honored them ; and that, in fact, he felt 
that, according to circumstances, the surplice might be 
worn ; and that when a man had it on him — why— he had it 
on him ! There was no mistake about it. Then, that there 
were others who did not wear surplices — and, of course, as 
to those who did not wear them — why, they were not in 
the habit if putting them on; and that, really, he nuist 
say that on this question, the discipline of the Church was 
such that it was very hard precisely to say whether the 
wearing of a surplice, or the not wearing of a surplice, 
was precisely the most convenient, — and, to use a vulgar 
phrase, he bamboozled them — (laughter) — and, under HeaA^en, 
thev did not know what he meant. One miDute he told 
thern it was right ; the next minute he told them it might be 
wrong. And that on the mere question of a surplice ! The 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



21 



Catholic Church, comes out on a question affecting the exis« 
tence of God; Heaven; the Revelation of Scripture; the 
Divinity of Jesus Christ. It is a question affecting an article 
of faith. She gives to the Church on this or that article of 
faith language as clear as a bell — language so clear and deci- 
ded that every child may know what God has revealed ; that 
this is what God teaches on this, for this is the truth. But 
the " Man of the Day" says : " What right has the Church 
to impose this on you ? Are you not a slave to believe it ? " 
I answer at once : "If it be a lie, you are a slave to believe 
it. If it be not a lie, but the truth — in the very belief of it, 
then, — in the knowledge of it, — lies your freedom, according 
to the words of Christ : ' You shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free.' " 

The whole question hinges upon this : Has the Church 
the power and the authority to teach you what is the truth ? 
She at once falls back upon the Scriptures and lays her 
hand upon the words of Jesus Christ, saying — "Go and 
teach all nations ; teach them all truth ; I will send the Spirit 
of Truth upon you to abide with you, and I, Myself, will 
be with you all days to the end of the world ; and the Gates 
of Hell, — that is to say, the spirit of error, — shall never, never, 
never prevail against My Church ! " If that be true, the 
whole question is over. If that word be true — if Jesus Christ 
be the God of Truth, as we know Him to be, then the whole 
controversy is at an end. He commands us to hear the 
Church, to accept her teachings, to grasp them, being the 
truth, with our minds as though we heard them immediately 
from the lips of our Lord God Himself — who is the very 
quintessence of truth and of intellectual freedom — for intel- 
lectual freedom lies in a knowledge of the truth. And now, 
let me give you a familiar proof of this. Let me suppose, 
now, that instead of being what I am — a Catholic priest and 
a monk — that I was — (God between us and harm ! — a Meth- 
odist, a Presbyterian, or that I was a Baptist, an Anabaptist, 
or anything of that kind, or a Quaker, or a Shaker, or any- 
thing that you like. And suppose that I came here, a man oi 
a certain amount of intellect and of originality, and that I had 
taken up, or that I had dreamt, last night, some crooked view 
of the Scriptures, and that I said in my own mind : " Well, 
perhaps, after all, Christ did not die on the cross ; perhaps 
that was one of those fictions that we find in history ;" and 
that I then came up, here, on this altar, and put that lie plausi- 
bly, — perhaps dogmatically — and tell you how many other lies 
were thus told — how this thing thus said was proved to be 



22 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



false, and that that thing thus said was proved to be false ;~ 
and that then I said to you, "what evidence have we of the 
crucifixion of our Lord but historical evidence ? Perhaps, 
after all, it was only a myth ? When we look into ourselves, 
and see how much there is in us of evil and how little of good, 
and then think of Christ coming to die for us and save us !— 
indeed, they say, there is a question whether He came at all 
or not. If I were only to put that question plausibly to you, 
what is to hinder me from deceiving you ? What is to hinder 
me, if I am able to do it eloquently and forcibly ? What is to 
save some of you from being imposed upon, and some of you 
from believing me ? You are at my mercy, so far as I can 
raise a doubt in your minds. I can put an intellectual chain 
upon you. You are at my mercy, and I am at the mercy of 
my own idle dreams. Well, let us take things as they are. I 
came here as a Catholic priest to you, who are Catholics. If 
I were here, this evening, to breathe one breath — one word — 
against the real presence of our Lord, — or against the infalli- 
bility of the Pope, — or against the indefectibility of the 
Church, — or against the power of the priest to absolve from 
sin, — or any other doctrine of the Catholic Church ; — if I was 
just to approach it with the faintest touch ; — is there a man 
among you — is there one in this church — who would not rise 
up and say : " You lie ! You are a heretic ! You are a false 
teacher ! You are a heathen and a pagan !" If I dared to do 
it, could I have the slightest influence on any one of you ? No. 
And why ? Because you know the truth. Why ? Because the 
Church of God has thrown the shield of dogma between you 
and every false teacher — between you and every one who 
would try to make you believe a lie. Isn't this freedom ? 

Some time ago, there was a poor man from the county 
Galway — my own county — came to us. The poor fellow 
went over to England, to earn the rent by reaping the har- 
vest. He had on a pair of stockings, a pair of brogues in a 
handkerchief, and he had a reaping-hook, and carried his 
little bundle on the hook, as he was going along. He went 
down into the southwest of England — into Gloucestershire. 
And, now, you must know that the Protestants of that part 
of England are what they call "Puseyites," — men who are 
fond of being, without being, as like Catholics as possible. 
And so my poor fellow went in one Sunday morning ; — to be 
sure, 'twas in a very strange place he found himself ; — but 
he heard the bells ring ; he walked along ; he saw a cross ; 
he saw, as he supposed, a church ; went in, and, (sure enough) 
saw a cross, found an altar, and the candles on it ; and three 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



23 



men — young men — attending, if you please, on the altar. 
There were a priest, and his deacon and sub-deacon, and a 
congregation — all kneeling down as the service went on ; and 
he thought he was all right. He knelt down, blessed himself, 
and everything went on smoothly, to all appearance ; and 
the mock Mass went on until the time came for the priest to 
preach, and the deacons and sub-deacons sat down in their 
chairs. The priest took off his vestments and laid aside his 
stole. He then blessed himself. There were many distin- 
guished personages there — all Protestants. In his beautiful 
sermon he called the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of 
God ! All this time the poor Galway man was beating his 
breast. Everything went off delightfully until the man came 
to tell the people that were coming in, " Now," says he, 
some of you, my dear brethren," — (he was an elegant English 
Protestant, highly educated) — "Now my dearly beloved 
brethren," says he, " some among you, no doubt, are going 
to approach the holy communion; — but, of course, I don't 
wish to force my opinion upon you, — but you must remember 
that faith is required, and I humbly hope that as many of 
you as go to the altar will believe that you are about, really, 
to receive the Lord. I don't want to say, for an instant, 
that this is absolutely necessary, or that I put it upon you 
under the awful penalty of excommunication ; but still I 
hope you will approach it in the right faith." " God bless 
my soul!" says the poor Galway man. "This is too bad! 
I have never seen the like of this before ! " So he stoops 
down, takes up his hat, and goes for the door ! When he 
was telling it to me, said he, "Why, your reverence, it was 
only when he got to the end of the sermon that he let the cat 
out of the bag !" Now, I ask you who was the free man in 
that church ? Was it not the man whose intelligence, humble 
as he was, uneducated as he was in worldly learning — but 
with the knowledge of the Catholic Church in his soul — 
was it not he whose intelligence instantly rose up and re- 
jected the false doctrine and shook off the slavery off the 
lie ? Need I say any more ? Before I end I will come to 
vindicate the Church, my mother, as is my duty, from any 
charge of ever fostering slavery, or of ever rivetting one 
fetter upon the intelligence of man. But I think I have so 
far sufficiently brought it home to the intellect of every one 
among you that if the knowledge of the truth, the 
possession of The truth, the grasping of the truth, making 
freedom of the intellect according to the definition of it 
by the word of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ — that 



24 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



man alone can have that freedom who receives the truth 
knowing it to be the truth, from the mouth of one whom Christ 
the Son of God, declares could never teach man a lie ! 

But, now, we pass to the second great stronghold of 
freedom or of slavery in the soul of man ; and that is, the 
will. For, you know that, strictly speaking, the will of man, 
— that free will that God gives us — that that is really aud 
truly the subject-matter either of freedom or of slavery. If 
a man has the freedom of his will he is free ; if a man's will 
is coerced he is a slave. I grant you that. But when is 
that will coerced? What is the definition of the word 
" freedom," so far as it touches human will ? I answer at 
once, and define the freedom of the human will to be, on the 
one side, obedience to recognized and just law, and, on the 
other side freedom from over-ruling or coercing action of 
any authority, or of any power that is not legitimately 
appointed to govern and rule the will. We are slaves if we 
are bound to observe laws that are, in themselves, unjust — 
laws that involve an immoral act ; and no man but a slave 
is bound to obey them. Thus, for instance, if the law of the 
land tells me that what I have heard from any one of my 
Catholic children at the confessional, I am to go and make a 
deposition of it, that is to use it as evidence against him — if 
the law said that — (and the law has sometimes said it) — the 
Catholic priest knows, and every Catholic knows, that the 
observance of that law would make a slave of the priest — it 
would take away from his over-ruling conscience that dic- 
tates to his will — so that if he observed that law he would be 
a slave ; but if he died rather than observe it he would be a 
martyr and an apostle of freedom! Secondly, the freedom 
of the will lies in being free from every influence, from every 
coercing power that has no right or title whatever to command 
that will, who has a right to command the will of man ? Al- 
mighty God, who made it. Every human law that tells us, do 
this or do that has authority only inasmuch as it is the echo of 
the eternal voice, commanding or prohibiting. I will only 
obey the law because St. Paul tells us "the law comes from 
on high" — that all power, all law, comes from Almighty 
God. Any other power that is opposed to God, any other 
power that upsets the reasons of God, has nothing whatever 
to say to the will of man, and if the will of man submits to 
the persuasion or coercion of that power, by that very fact 
it becomes a slave. 

Now, what are the great powers that assert themselves in 
this our age upon the will of man ? What are the great pow- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



25 



ers that make slaves of us? I answer, they are the world 
around us and its principles — our own passions within us, and 
our sinful inclinations. Reflect upon it ! We live in a world 
that has certain principles, that lays down certain maxims and 
acts upon them. The world has its own code of laws; the 
world has its own sins, greater or lesser. For instance, a man 
is insulted. The world tells him to go, take a revolver, and 
wipe out the insult in the blood of the man who dares to insult 
him. This is the world's law, but it is opposed to God's law, 
which says : "Love your enemies, and pardon them for my 
sake ! 5) The world says to a man, " You are in a good posi- 
tion ; you have place, power, influence, patronage ; you have 
it in your power to enrich yourself. Ah ! don't be so squeam- 
ish ; don't be so mealy-mouthed ; shove a friend in here. Let 
a man have a chance of taking up his own pickings. Put 
another man to do the same there. Take something for your- 
self." The world says this, and I believe you have evidence 
of it every other day. The world says to the man of pleasure : 
" You are fond of certain sins of impurity. Ah ! but my dear 
friend, you must keep that thing very quiet. Keep it under 
the rose as long as you can. There is no great harm in it. It 
it is only the weakness of our nature. You may go on and 
enjoy yourself as much as you choose ; only be circumspect 
about it. Keep it as quiet as possible, and do not let your 
secret be found out." The great sin is being found out. This 
is the way of the world. It thus operates upon men. It thus 
influences our will and makes us bow down and conform to 
the manners and customs of those around us. How true this 
is ! Is there anything more common ? Here I have heard it 
over and over again since I came to America : " Oh, father, 
we are very different in this country from what we were in 
the old country. In the way of going to Mass in this country 
on Sunday, you cannot go unless you are well dressed. In 
the old country they go no matter how they are. In this 
country people would look on it as queer if you did not go as 
well dressed as your neighbor. In the old country they were 
very particular about stations, and about going to confession. 
They used all to go to their duty at Christmas, or Easter — and 
often more frequently — but in this country scarcely anybody 
goes at all." This is the language I have heard. It is not 
uncommon. Now, what does all this mean ? What has this 
country or that, this portion of the world or that, this maxim 
of the world or that, — what has it to do with your will? 
Where, in reason, — where, in faith, — where, in Scripture, can 
you find me one word, from Almighty God to man : " Son of 
2 



26 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



man, do as those around you do ; conform your life to the 
usages of the world around you — to the maxims of the world 
in which you live." But Christ has said: "Be not conformed 
to this world, for the friendship of this world is enmity before 
God." All the passions within us — oh ! those terrible pas- 
sions ! — the strong, the unreasoning, the lustful desires of 
youth — the strong, unreasoning revengeful pride and pas- 
sions of man; — the strong, unreasoning desire to be enriched 
before his time by means which are accursed; — the strong 
passions within him, whatever they may be, that rise up, like 
giants, in his path, — ah, these are the most terrible tyrants of 
them all, when they assume dominion over man — and, above 
all, when they assume the aggravated and detestable dominion 
of habit. Let me say a word to you about this. There is not 
a man among us who hasn't his own little world of iniquity 
within. Not one ! There is not a man among us, even of 
those who are within the sanctuary, that must not work out 
his salvation with fear and trembling. And why ? Because 
he has great enemies in his own passions. Now, the Almighty 
God's design is that those passions should become completely 
subject to the dominion of reason by the free will of man. 
As long as man is able to keep them down, to subdue them — 
so long as a man is able to keep humble, pure, chaste, temper- 
ate, in spite of them, that man is free ; because he controls 
and keeps down those servants, his passions, that the 
Almighty God never intended should govern him. Now, the 
intention of Almighty God is that we should keep down those 
passioDs. The second intention of Almighty God is, therefore, 
that if they rise, as rise they do, in many cases, and, for a 
time overpower the soul, and induce a man to commit this 
sin or that, — that he must at once rise up out of that sin, put 
down that passion, and chain it down under the dominion of 
reason and will ; because, if he lets it remain and allows it to 
subdue him, and seduce him into sin again, in an inconceiva- 
bly short time that passion will become the habit and the 
tyrant of his life. For instance, if a man gets drunk (I 
wonder if there is any one among you that was ever drunk ?) 
— (laughter) — if so, I ask that man and say: "My dear 
friend, try to recall the first time you got drunk. Do you 
remember next morning what state your head was in ? A 
splitting as if it would go asunder. You felt that you would 
give half of all you were worth for a drink of water. Your 
tongue was dry and parched, and a coarse fur on it. How 
you got up in the morning and did not know what to do with 
yourself for the whole day, going about here and there, and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



21 



afraid to eat, your stomach being so sick ; afraid to lie down, 
and not able to remain up or go to work ; moaning and shak- 
ing and not able to get over the headache of the preceding 
night. That was the first time, and you made vows it should 
be the last. Next day a friend came along and says — " Let 
us go out and take a glass of toddy ? " He wants you to take 
medicine. I remember once I heard of a man in this particu- 
lar state, and when he saw brandy and water before him, he 
said: "No, sir; I would rather take Epsom salts." And 
why? Because the habit is not yet formed; the habit is 
not yet confirmed. But go on, my friend. Don't mind 
that. When that headache and that first sickness goes 
away, go on, and after awhile, when you have learned 
to drink, the headache does not trouble you any more; 
you get used to it ; the poison assimilates to the sys- 
tem ; — but the habit is come, the physical weakness is gone, 
and the habit of sin is come. Now, I would like to see you, 
if you were drunk yesterday evening, to be able to resist 
"taking your morning." You could not do it? I have seen 
a man — I was at his bedside — and the Doctor was there 
after taking him over six long days of delirium tremens, 
and the doctor said to him — "As sure as God created 
you, if you take brandy or whiskey for the next week you 
will be a dead man ! it will kill you ! " I was present, I 
was trying to see if the poor fellow would go to confes- 
sion. There was the bottle of brandy ; it stood near him 
on the table; for they had had to give him brandy. And 
while the doctor was yet speaking to him, I saw his eyes 
fastened on it, and the hand creeping up towards it ; and 
if ever you saw a hungry horse or mule looking at oats, it 
was he, when, with his eyes devouring the bottle, he reached 
out, and put it to his head, after hearing that, as surely as 
God made him, so surely would he die if he drank of it ! 
He could not help it. Where, then, was that man's freedom ? 
It had perished in the habit of sin. Look at Holofernes, as 
we read of him in Scripture — the profane, the impure man ! 
What does the Scripture say of him? That when Judith 
came into his tent, the moment he looked upon her, the 
moment he cast his eyes upon the woman, he loved her. He 
could not help it. His senses had enslaved him. His will ! 
He had no will. Speak to me of the freedom of the will of 
a thirsty animal going to the water to drink, and I believe it. 
Speak to me of the freedom of will of a raging lion, L linger- 
ing for days, and seeing food and leaving it, and I will 
believe in it as soon as I believe in the freedom of the 



28 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



will of the man who has enslaved himself in the habit of 
sin ! Therefore, Almighty God intends either that we should 
be free from sin altogether, keeping down the habit of all 
those passions, or if they, from time to time, rise np, taking 
us unawares, taking us off our feet, not to yield to them, 
but to chain them down again, and not by indulgence to 
make them grow into habits. Now, the essence of freedom 
in the will of man lies not in the restraint of legitimate 
authority but in the freedom from all care, and from those 
powers and influences that neither God, nor man, nor society 
intended should influence or govern his will. Here I come 
home again to the subject of my lecture. Now I invite 
you again to consider where shall we find the means of 
emancipating our will from these passions and other bad 
influences. Where shall we find the means ? Will knowl- 
edge do it ? No. Will faith do it ? No. It is a strange 
thing to say, but knowledge, no matter how extensive, no 
matter how profound, gives no command over the passions ; 
no intellectual motives influence them. " Were it for me," 
says a great orator of the present day, Dr. Wilberforce, in 
his " Earnest Cry for a Reformation "when you can moor 
a vessel with a thread of silk then you may hope to elevate 
this human knowledge, and, by human reason, to tie down 
and restrain those giants — the passions and the pride of 
man." I know as much of the law of God as any among 
you — more probably than many — for we are to teach. Does 
my knowledge save me from sin? Will that knowledge 
keep me in the observance of the sacred vows I took at the 
altar of God ? Is it to that knowledge that I look for the 
power and strength within me to keep every sinful passion 
down in sacerdotal purity — every grovelling desire down in 
monastic poverty — every sin — every feeling of pride down, in 
religious obedience ? Is it to my knowledge I look for that 
power ? No ! I might know as much as St. Augustine and yet 
be imperfect. I might be a Pilate in atrocity, and yet as proud 
a man ! There is another question involving the great neces- 
sity of keeping down these passions. I would like to know 
where, in history, you could find a single evidence of knowl- 
edge restraining the passions of man, and purifying him? 
No ; the grace of God is necessary — the grace of God coming 
through fixed specific channels to the soul. The actual par- 
ticipation of the holiness and the infinite sanctity of Christ is 
necessary. Where is that to be found ? Where is that to be 
found that will save the young from sin, and save the sinner 
from the slavery of the habit of sin ? Where is that to be 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



29 



found which will either tie down the passions altogether, or if 
they occasionally rise up, put them down again and not allow 
them to grow into the gigantic tyrannical strength of habit ? 
Where, but in the Catholic Church ? Take, for example, the 
Sacrament of Penance. These children are taught, with the 
opening of reason, their duty to God. You may say the 
Church is very unreasonable because, to-day, she tells you 
that she will not allow these children to go to your common 
schools, or to any other schools where they are not taught of 
God — where they are not taught the holiness of God, the 
things of God, the influence of God, mixed up with every ad- 
dition of knowledge that comes to their minds. You may say 
the Church is unreasonable in that. No ! because she tries to 
keep them from sin ? She tries to give them the strength that 
will bind these passions down, so as to make moral men, truth- 
ful men, pure-minded men of them — and to give them com- 
plete victory, if possible, over these passions. But if, as age 
comes on, as temptations come on, if the Catholic man goes 
and gets drunk — if the Catholic man falls into any sin, this or 
that one, at once the Church comes before him, and at the mo- 
ment he crosses the threshold of the sanctuary, and his eyes 
fall upon the confessional, that moment he is reminded of the 
admonition, " Come to me ! come to me ! and wash your soul 
in the blood of the Lamb ! Come and tell your sin !" The 
very consciousness of the knowledge of having to confess that 
sin ; the humiliation of being obliged to tell it in all its de- 
tails — to tell it with so much self-accusation, and sense of self- 
degradation for having committed it, — is, in itself, a strong 
check to prevent it, and a strong, powerful influence, even 
humanly speaking, against again falling into it, or repeating 
it. As the confessional saves from the tyranny of the pas- 
sions, and, above all, breaks up the means and does not allow 
the habit of sin to become a second nature in the life of man, 
what is the consequence ? The Catholic man, if he only ob- 
serves his religion, if he only exercises himself in its duties, if 
he only goes to confession, if he only partakes in its sacra- 
ments and uses them ; the Catholic man is free in his will by 
Divine grace as he is free in his intelligence by love. Knowl- 
edge of the truth is freedom of the intellect — freedom from 
every agency, from every power that might control the free- 
dom of the will, — and that is effected by Divine grace. So far, 
we have seen that Almighty God has reproduced in the Church 
the elements of true freedom. I do not say that the Catholic 
Church was the " mother " of human freedom. I said she was 
" the foster mother j" for, to use a familiar phrase, w r e are lit- 



30 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



erally and truly put out, as it were, by the Church. The free- 
dom which we possess came to us, not from the Church, but 
from God. He came down from Heaven, after man had been 
four thousand years in sin — after man had lost his noble inher- 
itance of knowledge, of light, of freedom, and power and self- 
restraint. He came in the darkness ; and He gave the light. 
He came in slavery ; and he gave freedom. Having thus re- 
stored in man what he lost in Adam, He then, as He Himself 
tells us in the parable of the Good Samaritan, gave us to the 
Church, and said — " Take care of this race ; preserve them in 
this light of knowledge and freedom of truth. Preserve them 
till I come back again, and I will pay thee well for thy care !" 
Now, my friends, if there were one here to-night who is not a 
Catholic, he might smile in his own soul and say : " This friar 
is a very cunning fellow. He dresses up things plausibly 
enough so long as he is arguing in the clouds about freedom 
and the elements of freedom, and the soil of freedom. Oh, he 
is quite at home there ! Ah, but when he comes down from 
the clouds to find how this Church, this terrible Church, this 
enslaving Church, has dealt with society, then let him look 
out ! Then let us hear what he has to say for himself ! " 

Again, what are those charges that are laid against the 
Catholic Church ? The first charge alleged against her is that 
she does not allow people to read everything that is published. 
It is quite true. If the Church had her will, there are a great 
many books, that are considered now by many people very 
nice reading, that would all be put in the fire. I acknowledge 
that ; I admit it. Tell me, my friends, — and are there not a 
great many fathers of families among you ? — if one of you 
found with his little boy some blackguard book, some filthy, 
vile, immoral book, would you let your child read it ? Would 
you consider that you were enslaving his mind by taking that 
book from him and putting it in the fire before his face ? If 
you found one of your sons reading some very beautiful pas- 
age of Voltaire, in which he makes a laughing-stock of faith, 
and tries to raise a laugh against Christ on the cross, would 
you consider you were doing badly for your child — would you 
consider yourself enslaving him — by taking that back from 
him and putting it in the fire ? 

Now, this is what the Catholic Church does. She declares 
that people have no right to read that which is against faith 
and morals ; that which is against the truth of Christ ; that 
which is against the divinity of Christ — that in which the pride 
of the unregenerated mind of man rises up and says : " I will 
not believe !" And, not content with this, he writes a book, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



31 



and trips to make everybody believe and say the same thing. 
The Church says : " Don't read it." There are some whom 
she allows to read it. She lets me read it. She lets my fel- 
low-priests read it. Sometimes she even obliges us to read it. 
Why ? Because she knows we have knowledge enough to see 
the falsity of it, and she allows us to read it that we may re- 
fute it. She does not allow you to read it. And why ? I do 
not care to flatter you, my friends. Nothing is more com- 
monly used to lead people astray than a plausible lie. I de- 
clare to you that although I think " the truth is great and 
must prevail ;" that if I had my choice given to me, and I 
could do it without sin, — if it were given to me to come out 
and try to enforce the truth or to make you believe a lie — I 
really believe I would be able sooner to do the second ; it is 
so much easier for us to flatter — especially with a lie to natter 
your pride — to tell you you are the finest fellows in the world — 
to tell you you must not be governed by a certain class — that 
you must not be paying taxes ; — that you have no right to 
support an army and navy ; — that you have no right to pay a 
class of men to govern you ; — and thus they go on, playing 
into your hands, your love of money and your love of your- 
self. There is no lie among the whole catalogue of lies that, 
if I were like them, I would not tell you — (laughter) — and I 
could make you believe it (laughter). The Church says there 
is, in a certain book, an immoral lesson or a lie, and I will not 
allow my children to read it. There are books published, and 
I have seen them in the hands of Protestant boys and girls, 
and the very Pope of Rome has not leave to read them. They 
are books that contain direct appeals to immorality, direct 
appeals to the passions — books against both faith and morals, 
that the Church does not allow to be read by any one. But is 
this slavery ? But the argument against Catholicity is that 
the men who make scientific discoveries — the men who said 
that the world was round, for instance — men who said that 
the world was round, when it was generally believed to be a 
great flat plain, were put in prison. There is one answer to 
that : There is not a single instance in history of the Church 
joining issue with any minister on any purely scientific sub- 
ject, and persecuting him for it. If there was not any ques- 
tion of faith or morals involved, she bid him " God speed !" 
and told him to go on with his discoveries if there was any- 
thing useful in them, and nothing hostile to religion in them. 
I will give you an instance : In the sixth century there was an 
Irish saint who was called Virgilius — (in his own country his 
name was Feargil) — and this man was a great Culdee monk, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



and a great scholar. The result of his speculations was that 
he became satisfied in his own mind that this world was a 
globe — round — as it is — and that there must, therefore, be an- 
tipodes — one on this side and one on the other side, and that 
there must be seas between one land and another. He an- 
nounced this, and it came among the scientific men of the day, 
and fell among them, really and truly, as if a bomb-shell had 
burst at their feet. The scholars of the day, the universities 
of the day, appealed to Rome against him for having pro- 
nounced so fearful a theory ; they said it was heresy. What 
did the Pope do ? Remember you can consult the authorities 
for yourselves. I can give you chapter and verse, if you want 
them. What did that Pope do ? fie summoned this man to 
Rome. He said, " You are charged with a strange doctrine — 
with saying that the world is a sphere — a globe. Tell us all 
about it ?" He did so. What answer did Feargil get ? The 
Pope took him by the hand : "My dear friend," he said, " go 
on with your astronomical discoveries," — and he made him 
Archbishop of Salzburg, and sent him home with a mitre on 
his head. This is how the Catholic Church dealt with intel- 
lectual liberty when that intellectual liberty did not claim for 
itself anything bad, and was void of anything that interfered 
with or was opposed to Christian faith or morals. Do you 
wish to make us out slaves because we ought not to get a 
knowledge of evil ? One of the theories of the day is that it 
is better to let little boys and girls read everything, good and 
bad ; to know everything. Is it better ? Do you think you 
know better than Almighty God? There was one tree in the 
garden of Eden, and Almighty God gave a commandment to 
Adam and Eve, that they should neither taste of it nor touch 
it. What tree was it ? It was the " tree of knowledge, of 
good and evil." Did Almighty God intend to exclude from 
Adam the knowledge of good ? No ; but He intended to ex- 
clude from him the fatal knowledge of evil. A prohibition 
against reading a very bad book was the first and only prohi- 
bition that Almighty God gave to the first man. "Don't 
touch that tree," said He, " because if you do you will come to 
the knowledge of that which is evil." " When ignorance is 
bliss 'tis folly to be wise." So says Pope. 

Now, my friends, who are they that make this charge 
against the Catholic Church, that she enslaves her children ? 
Who are they that tell us that the historical mother of all the 
great universities in the old world is afraid of knowledge ? 
Who are they who tell us that the Church, whose monks, in 
her cloisters, preserved art and science for a thousand years— 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



33 



f) reserved all the ancient relics that we have of ecclesiastical 
earning, and of the learning of Greece and Rome ? Who are 
they who tell us that the Church that set her monks, her al- 
chemists, and students experimentalizing in their cloisters in 
the Middle Ages, until most of what are called the modern 
discoveries were made or anticipated by them — who are they 
who tell us that the Church is the enemy of light and knowl- 
edge and of freedom ? Who are they ? They are the Freema- 
sons of the day ! Freemasons. 

Now, you will allow me, if you please, to retort the asser- 
tion on my friends the Masons — Mazzini and Garribaldi and 
Bismarck — for all these are Freemasons. They all say, " Oh, 
let us wash our hands clean of this old institution — The 
Catholic Church. She would make slaves of us all. We 
must give the people freedom ; we must give them liberty." 
And then they lay on taxation. Then they tell every citizen 
in the land that he must lay aside his spade and become a 
soldier. They tell every man eighteen years of age that he is 
to fight for freedom, and they thrust him into the army. 
Call you this freedom ? Yet this is what they give for the 
liberty of the Church ! Are they free themselves, these 
Freemasons ? I will give you one answer — and one is as 
good as a thousand. Last December twelvemonth, when I was 
in the city of Dublin, a man came to me. He had attended % 
series of sermons I was preaching in our church there. He 
was an intellectual, a well-educated man. He came to me, 
and said, " I ought to be a Catholic ; but the fact of it is I 
have been so long away from the sacraments and everything 
religious that I can scarcely say I am, even in name, a Cath- 
olic. But now," he says, " I feel and I know that I must do 
something to save my soul." Well, I took him, and 
instructed him in the Holy Sacraments, gave him the Holy 
Communion, and sent him away. He said that he had never, 
for years upon years, known such happiness, and he went on 
his way. That man received confirmation, and was constant 
in his duty from December until the month of April. Then 
I waited for him, but, instead of his coming, he wrote a letter 
to me. " My Rev. friend," he said. " You will, no doubt, 
be disappointed to find I am not coming to you on Saturday. 
The fact of it is, I cannot come. I find that I cannot shake 
off Freemasonry. I have got several notices from my Masonic 
brethren that I must either adhere to them or give up my 
religion. My religion has brought me more happiness than I 
ever experienced in my life, and it is with bitter regret I tell 
you that my business is falling off; that they are turning 



34 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION - . 



away my customers from me — and they tell me they will 
bring me to a beggar's grave — a wretched end ; and they can 
and will do it. Therefore I hope you will not forget me, but 
I must give up the happiness 1 have had ! " Was that man 
free, I ask you ? Who are the men who turn round and tell 
me, " I am not free?" — who tell me, " I am not free," because, 
indeed, I am not fettered like a slave, bound by every filthy 
passion ! Who are they that tell me " I am not free," 
because I do not, of my own free will, incline myself and 
pollute my mind with every species of evil and impurity ? 
Who are they who tell me I am not free, because in the 
Church I have to believe that what she teaches is true ? But 
I tell them it is true. Who are the gentlemen who told my 
friend that, at the peril of his life, he must return to them, 
and give up his religion ? These are the men who turn 
round, nowadays, and tell us that in the Catholic Church a 
man is not free ! But this is the Church that has brought 
me from the slavery of sin, into the freedom of God, and 
the glorious liberty of an heir of Heaven. As long as you 
pursue any scientific research, as long as you extend your 
mind in any legitimate, healthy, moral course of liter- 
ature, or in any intellectual pursuit, you have the bless- 
ing and the encouragement of the Church upon you. Don't 
mind the world if it call you a slave. If you come to a 
certain point, if you read certain books, the Church says you 
must become either an impure man or an infidel. Don't read 
them, in God's name ! It is not slavery for the intellect to 
repudiate a lie. It is not slavery for the will to reject that 
which, if once accepted, asserts the dominion of the slavery 
of sin and of habit over the souls of men. This, do I say 
with truth: that our mother, the Church, in the principles 
which our Lord established, in her daily sacerdotal exercises, 
is the foster-mother of human freedom. It is a historical 
and a remarkable fact, that the kings of Europe — the King 
of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the King of England, 
the King of France — exercised the most absolute and irres- 
ponsible power precisely at the time when the Catholic Church 
was weakened in her influence over them by the heresy of 
Martin Luther. It is most remarkable that so absolute in 
England was Henry the Eighth — (and never was there a 
king whose absolute manner of governing, and whose conduct 
recalls more the days of the Grand Turk,) that he married 
a woman to-day, he killed her to-morrow, and who was to 
call him to account? So absolute a king could not have 
done this as a Catholic, and he threw aside his allegiance 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



35 



If a Catholic king had done these things — if Henry's father 
had done them — if any one of Henry's Catholic predecessors 
had done it, his excommunication would have come from 
Rome. He would have been afraid of his life to do it. He 
would have been afraid of the Pope. What was this but 
securing the people's liberty ? Thus do we see that so long 
as the Catholic religion had power to exercise, and exercised 
that power, she exercised that power to coerce kings into 
justice, into respect for their subjects and for law, for prop- 
erty and for life. This is a historical fact, that the Tudors 
assumed an absolute sovereignty as soon as they shook off 
the Pope, and declared to the people that they were the lords 
and rulers of the consciences, as well as of the civil obedience 
of men. We also know that Gustavus, the Protestant King 
of Sweden, assumed absolute power. We also know that 
that power grew into iron fetters under Charles the Fifth, 
who, though not a Protestant himself, but a good Catholic, 
yet governed a people who were divided in their principles 
of allegiance, and he forsook the world for the Church. We 
can bring home history to prove that the weakening of the 
Catholic Church in her temporal power over society has been 
the cause of the assumption of more power, more absolute 
dominion, and more tyrannical exercise of that dominion on 
the part of every ruler in Europe, — and, therefore, I say that, 
historically, as well as in principle, the Catholic Church is 
the foster-mother of human liberty. And now, my friends, 
you will be able, by word of mouth, to answer all those who 
call you slaves because you are Catholics. You may as well 
call a man a slave because he obeys his father. You may as 
well say the child is a slave because there are certain grind- 
ing laws and rules that govern him. You may as well say 
that the citizen is a slave because he acknowledges the 
power of the State to legislate for him, and he bows to the 
power of that legislation. 



J 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered in the Dominican Church of St. Vincent Fer- 
rer, in Lexington Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street, New York, on Sunday, 
March 10, by the Rev. Father Burke.] 

" THE CHURCH, THE MOTHER AND INSPIRATION OF ART." 

Dearly Beloved Brethren: This morning I told you 
the Holy Catholic Church was the spouse of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, so described to us in Scripture as " dear to the Lord," 
the interior beauty of which the psalmist says is "Like the 
beauty of the king's daughter," and of the exterior of which 
he spoke when he said: "The queen stood at His right 
hand, and in golden garb, surrounded with variety." We 
saw, moreover, this morning, that the interior beauty and 
ineffable loveliness of the Church consists, above all, in this, 
that she holds enshrined in her tabernacles the Lord, the* 
Redeemer of the world, as the Blessed Virgin Mary, His 
mother, held Him in her arms in Bethlehem, as the cross sup- 
ported Him on Mount Calvary ; that she possesses His ever- 
lasting truth which He left as her inheritance, and which it is 
her destiny not only to hold but to proclaim and propagate 
to all the nations ; and finally, that she holds in her hands 
the sacramental power and agencies by which souls are 
sanctified, purified and saved. In these three features we saw 
the beauty of the Church of God ; in these three we beheld 
how the mystery of the Incarnation is perpetuated in her, for 
Christ our Lord did not forever depart from earth, but, 
according to His own word, came back and remained. " I 
will not leave you orphans," he said " but I will come to you 
again, and I will remain with you all days, even to the con- 
summation of the world." We see in these three wonderful 
features of the Church's interior beauty how she is truly 
"the city of the Living God," "the abode of grace and 
holiness ; " and, therefore, that all the majesty, all the beauty, 
all the material grandeur which it is in our power to invest 
her with, it becomes our duty to give to her, that she may 
thus appear before the eyes of men a fitting tabernacle for 
our Divine Lord, Himself. We have seen, moreover, how the 
Church of God, acting upon the instincts of her divinely 
infused life and perpetual charity, has always endeavored to 
attest and to proclaim her faith by surrounding the object 
of that Faith, her God, with all that earth hold as most pre- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



37 



cious and most dear. I then told you (if you remember) this 
morning, that the subject for our evening's consideration 
would be the exterior beauty of the Holy Church of God — > 
some other features that belong to her distinct from, though 
not independent of, the three great singular graces of God's 
abiding presence, of God's infallible truth, and of the unceas- 
ing stream of sacramental grace that, through her, flows 
onward, — features of divine beauty which we may recognize 
upon the face of our Holy Mother, the Church. Therefore, 
dearly beloved, the things that are indicated by the exterior 
garb with which the prophet invested the spouse oi Christ : 
" The queen stood on the right hand in golden garb surrounded 
with variety " — every choicest gem, every celestial form of 
beauty embroidered upon the heavenly clothing of Heaven's 
Queen, every rarest jewel let into the setting of that golden 
garment, every brightest color shining forth upon her. 
What is this exterior beauty of the Church ? I answer that 
it consists in many things — in many influences — in the many 
ways in which she has acted upon society. Ever faithful to 
the cause of God and to the cause of humanity ; ever faithful 
to her heavenly trust, after more than eighteen hundred years 
of busy life, she stands to-day, before the world, and no man 
can fix upon her virgin brow the shame of deception, the 
shame of cruelty, the shame of the denial of the food of 
man's real life, the Word of Truth. No man can put 
upon her the taint of dishonor, of a compromise 
with hell or with error, or with any power that is hos- 
tile to the sovereignty of God or to the interests of 
man. Many, indeed, are the ways in which the Church 
of God has operated upon society. Of these many ivays, 
I have selected as the subject for our evening's illustra- 
tion, the power reposed in the Catholic Church, and 
attested by undoubted historical evidences, — the power 
which she exercised as the Mother and inspirer of the fine 
arts. And here let me first of all say, that, besides the useful 
and necessary arts which occupy men in their daily life — the 
arts that consist in maintaining the essential necessaries, and 
in providing the comforts of life — the arts that result in 
smoothing away all the difficulties that meet us in our path in 
life, as far as the hand of man can materially affect this — 
besides these useful and necessary arts — there are others 
which are not necessary for our existence, nor, perhaps, even 
for our comfort— but are necessary to meet the spiritual 
cravings and aspirations of the human soul — and that fling a 
grace around our lives. There are arts and sciences which 



38 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



elevate the mind, soothe the heart, and captivate the under- 
standing and the imagination of man. These are called "the 
fine arts." For instance : it is not necessary for your life or 
for mine that our eyes should rest with pleasure upon some 
beautiful painting. Without that we could live. Without 
that we could have all that is necessary for our existence — 
for our daily comfort. Yet, how refining, how invigorating, 
how pleasing to the eye, and to the soul to which that eye 
speaks, is the language that speaks to us silently, yet elo- 
quently, as from the lips of a friend, from works of architec- 
ture, or sculpture, or painting. It is not necessary for our 
lives, nor for the comfort of our lives, if you will, that our 
ears should be charmed with the sweet notes of melodious 
music ; but is there one among us that has not, at some time 
or other, felt his soul within him soothed, and the burden of 
his sorrow lightened, the pleasure he enjoyed increased and 
enhanced, when music, with its magic spell, fell upon his ear. 
It is not necessary for our lives that our eyes should be 
charmed with the sight of some grand majestic building ; 
but who, among us, is there who has not felt the emotion of 
sadness swell within him as he looked upon the green ivy- 
clad ruin of some ancient church ? Who is there among us 
that has not, at some time or other, felt the softening, refi- 
ning, though saddening influences that creep over him when 
entering within some time-honored ruin of an abbey, he beheld 
the old lance-shaped windows, through which came streams 
of sunshine like the " light of other days," and beheld the 
ancient tracery on that which stood behind the high altar, 
and had once been filled with legends of angels and saints — 
but now open to every breeze of heaven: — when he looked 
upon the place as that in which his imagination pictured to 
him holy bishops and mitred abbots officiating there and 
offering up the unbloody sacrifice, while the vaulted arches 
and long drawn aisles resounded with the loud hosannas of 
the long lost monastic song ? Who is there among us who 
has not felt, at times elevated, impressed, aye filled with 
strong feelings of delight as his eye roamed steadily and 
gradually up to the apex of some grand cathedral, resting 
upon niches of saints and angels, and gliding from beauty to 
beauty, until, at length straining his vision, he beheld, high 
among the clouds of heaven, the saving sign of the Cross of 
Jesus Christ, upheld in triumph, and flinging its sacred 
shadow over the silent graves. It is thus these arts, called 
the Liberal or the Fine Arts, fill a great place, and accomplish 
a great work in the designs of God and in the history of 
God's Holy Church. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



30 



My friends, the theme which I have propounded to you 
contains two grave truths. The first of these is this : I claim 
for the Catholic Church that she is the mother of the arts; 
secondly, I claim for her the glory that she has been and ia 
their highest inspiration. What is it that forms the peculiar 
attraction — that creates the peculiar influence of art upon the 
soul of man, through his senses ? What is it that captivates 
the eye ? It is the ideal that speaks to him through art. In 
nature there are many beautiful things, and we contemplate 
them with joy, with delight. The faint blushes of the morn- 
ing, as the rising sun, with slanting beams, glides over the 
hills and through the glades, filling the valleys with rosy light, 
and revealing the slopes of the hill-side, so luxuriant and so 
bold, rising up towards the majestic towering mountains, and 
flinging the shadow of its snow-crowned summit into Heaven — 
all this is grand, all this is beautiful. But in nature, because 
it is nature, the perfectly beautiful is rarely or never found. 
Some one thing or other is wanting that would lend an addi- 
tional feature of loveliness to the scene which we contemplate, 
or to the theme, the hearing of which delights us. Now the 
aim of the Catholic soul of art is to take the beautiful wher- 
ever it is found, to abstract it from all that might deform it, 
or to add all that might be wanting to its perfect beauty — to 
add to it every feature and every element that can fulfil the 
human idea of perfect loveliness, and to fling over all the still 
higher loveliness which was caught from Heaven. This is 
called " the Ideal " in art. We rarely find it in nature. Do 
we often find it in art ? We do not find that perfect beauty 
in the things around us. We look upon a picture, and there 
we behold portrayed with supreme power all the glory of the 
light that the sun can lend from Heaven — all the glory of ma- 
terial beauty — but in vain we look for inspiration. It is dead 
form and color. It has no soul ! Among the ancient nations — 
the great fountains of the ancient civilization — Egypt, Assy- 
ria, Greece, and, finally, Home — during the four thousand 
years that went before the coming of the Redeemer, these arts 
and sciences flourished. We have still the remains of the Coli- 
seum, for instance, in Rome, combining vastness of proportion 
with perfect symmetry, and the mind is oppressed at the im- 
mensity of size, while the eye is charmed with the beauty of 
proportion. 

But in the fourth and fifth centuries — after the foundation 
of the Church — after the promulgation of the Christian reli- 
gion — after the Roman Empire had bowed down her imperial 
head before the glory of the cross of Christ, it was in the de« 



40 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



signs of God that all that ancient civilization, all these ancient 
arts and sciences, should be broken up and perish. From 
Egypt, Syria, and the far East they came, and their glory con- 
centrated itself in Greece — later, and most of all, in Rome. 
All the wealth of the world was gathered into Rome. All the 
glory of earth was centralized in Rome. Whatever the world 
knew of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of music, was 
found in Rome, in the highest perfection to which the ancient 
civilization had brought it. Then came the moment when 
the Church was to enter upon her second mission — that of cre- 
ating a new world and a new civilization. Then came the mo- 
ment when Rome, and its ancient empire, gravitated to a cli- 
max by its three hundred years of religious persecution of 
the Church of God, and her crimes were about to be expi- 
ated. Then came the time when God's designs became 
apparent. Even as the storm cloud bursts forth and sweeps 
the earth in its resistless force, so, my dear friends, in these 
centuries of which I speak, from the fastnesses of the North 
came forth dreadful hordes of barbarians — men without civili- 
zation, men without religion — men without mercy — men with- 
out a written language— men without a history — men with- 
out a single refining element of faith among them — and they 
came, Goths and Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, onward sweep- 
ing in their resistless and almost countless thousands of war- 
riors, carrying slavery and destruction in their hands ; — and 
thus they swept over the Western world. Rome went down 
before them. All her glory departed ; and so the civilization 
of Greece and Rome was completely destroyed. Society was 
overthrown, and reduced to the first chaotic elements of its 
being. Every art, every science, every most splendid monu- 
ment of the ancient world was destroyed ; and, at the close 
of the fifth century, the work of the four thousand preceding 
years had to be done over again. Mankind was reduced to 
its primal elements of barbarism. Languages never before 
heard, barbaric voices were lifted up in the halls of the 
ancient palaces of Italy and in the forum of Rome. All the 
splendors of the Roman Empire disappeared, and, with them, 
almost every vestige of the ancient arts and civilization of 
the preceding times. No power of earth was able to with- 
stand the hordes of Attila. No army was able to make front 
against them. All went down before them, save and except 
one — one organization, one power in the world, — one power 
founded by Christ and compacted by the very hand of God 
— founded upon an immovable foundation of knowledge am 
a* truth — one power which, for divine purposes, was allowed a 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



41 



respite from persecution for a few years in order that she 
might be able to present to the flood of barbarism that swept 
away the ancient civilization, a compact and well-formed 
body, able to react upon them, — and that power was the Holy 
Church of God. She boldly met the assault ; she stemmed 
the tide ; she embraced and absorbed in herself nation after 
nation, million after million of those rude children of the 
Northern shores and forests. She took them, rough and 
barbarous as they were, to her bosom ; and at the end of the 
fifth century, the Church of God began her exterior, heroic 
mission of civilizing the world, and laying the foundations of 
modern civilization and of modern society. So it went on 
until the day when the capital of Rome was shrouded in 
flames, and the ancient monuments of her pride, of her glory, 
and of civilization, were ruined and fell, and almost every 
vestige of the ancient arts disappeared. The Church, on the 
one hand, addressed herself first and most immediately, to 
the Christianizing of these Northern nations. Therein lay 
her divine mission, therein lay the purpose for which she was 
created — to teach them the truths of God. While she did 
this she carefully gathered together all that remained of the 
traditions of ancient Pagan science and art. While all over 
Europe the greater part of the nations were engaged in the 
war between Northern barbarism and civilization, and the 
land was one great battle-field, overflowing with blood, the 
Church gathered into her arms all that she could lay her 
hands on, of ancient literature, of ancient science and art, 
and retired with them into her cloisters. Everywhere over 
the whole face of Europe and in Africa and Asia — every- 
where the monk was the one man of learning — the one man 
who brought with him, into his cloister, the devotion to God 
that involved the sacrifice of his life — the devotion to man 
that considers a neighbor's good, and makes civilization and 
refinement the purpose and study of his life ! Where, to-day, 
would be the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. If the 
Church of God, the Catholic Church, had not gathered their 
remnants into her cloisters? Where, to-day, would be, 
(humanly speaking) the very Scriptures themselves, if these 
monks of old had not taken them, and made the transcribing 
of them, and the multiplying copies of them, the business of 
their lives ? And so all that the world has of science, of art, 
— all that the world has of tradition — of music, of painting, 
of architecture — all that the world had of the arts of Greece 
and Rome, was treasured up for a thousand years in tha 
cloisters of the Catholic Church ! 



42 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION - . 



And, now, her two-fold mission began. While hei 

preachers evangelized — while they followed the armies of 
the Vandal and the Goth, from field to field, and back to 
their fastnesses of the North; while they converted those 
rude and terrible sons of the forest into meek, pure-minded 
Christians, upon the one hand, on the other the Church took 
and applied all the arts, all the sciences, all the human agen- 
cies that she had, — and they were powerful, — to the civiliz- 
ing and refining of these barbarous men. Then it was that 
in the cloisters there sprang up, created and fostered by the- 
Church of God, the fair and beautiful arts of painting, music, 
and architecture. I say " created" in the Church. There 
are many among you as well informed as I am in the his- 
tory of our civilization, and I ask you to consider that 
among the debris of the ruin of ancient Rome and of 
ancient Greece, although we possess noble monuments of the 
ancient architecture, have we even the faintest tradition of 
their music, or their paintings ? Scarcely anything. I have 
visited the ruined cities of Italy. I have stood within the 
walls of Ostium, at the mouth of the Tiber, when, after hun- 
dreds of years, for the first time the earth was removed and 
the ancient temples were revealed again. The painting is 
gone, and nothing but the faintest outline remains. Still 
less of the music of the ancients have we. We do not know 
what the music of ancient Greece or of ancient Rome was. 
All we know is that among the ancient Greeks there was a 
dull monotone or chorus, struck into an alternating strain. 
What the nature of their music was we know not. Of their 
sculpture, we have abundant remains ; and, indeed, on this it 
may be said that there has not been any modern art which 
has equalled, scarcely approached, the perfection of the 
ancient Grecian model. But the three sciences of architec- 
ture, painting, and music, have all sprung from the cloisters 
of the Church. What is the source of all great modern 
song ? When the voice of the singer was hushed everywhere 
else, it resounded in the Gregorian chant that pealed in loud 
hosannas through the long-drawn aisles of the ancient Catho- 
lic mediaeval churches. It first came from the mind — it came 
from out the loving heart of the holy Pope, Gregory, him- 
self a religious, and consecrated to God as a monk. Whence 
came the organ, the prince, the king of all instruments, the 
faithful type of Christianity — of the Christian congregation 
— so varied yet so harmonious, made up of a multitude of 
pipes and stops, each one differing from the other, yet all 
blending together into one solemn harmony of praise just aa 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



43 



you, who come in here before this altar, each one full of his 
own motives and desires — the young, the old, — the grave, the 
gay, — rich and poor — each with his own desire and experi- 
ence of joy, of sorrow, or of hope, — yet before this altar, and 
within these walls do they blend into one united and har- 
monious act of faith, of homage, and of praise before God ! 
Whence came the King of instruments to you — so majestic 
in form, so grand in its volume — so symbolical of the wor- 
ship which it bears aloft upon the wings of song ! In the 
cloisters of the benedictine monks do we first hear it for 
the first time. When the wearied Crusader came home from 
his Eastern wars, there did he sit down to refresh his soul 
with sacred song. There, during the solemn Mass of mid- 
night, or at the Church's office at matins, while he heard the 
solemn, plaintive chant of the Church, while he heard the 
low-blended notes of the accompanying organ, skilfully 
touched by the benedictine's hand, — then would his rugged 
heart be melted into sorrow and the humiliation of Christian 
forgiveness. And thus it is the most spiritualizing and high- 
est of all the arts and sciences — this heaven-born art of 
music. Thus did the Church of God make her Divine and 
civilizing appeal, and thus her holy influence was brought 
out, during those stormy and terrible times when she under- 
took the almost impossible task of humbling the proud, of 
purifying the unchaste, of civilizing the terrible, the fierce 
and the blood-stained horde of barbarians that swept, in 
their resistless millions, over the Roman Empire ? 

The next great art which the Church cultivated in her 
cloisters, and, which, in truth, was created by her, as it 
exists to-day, was the art of painting. Recall the circum- 
stances of the time. Printing was not yet invented. Yet 
the people had to be instructed, — and not only to be 
instructed but influenced ; for mere instruction is not suffi- 
cient. The mere appeal to the power of faith, or to the intel- 
lect of man, is not sufficient. Therefore did the Church call 
in the beautiful art of painting ; and the holy, consecrated 
monk in his cloister developed all the originality of his gen- 
ius and of his mind to reproduce the captivating forms — to 
reproduce, in silent but eloquent words, the mysteries of the 
Church, — the mysteries which the Church has taught from 
her birth. Then did the mystery of the Redemption, the 
Incarnation of the Son of God, the angels coming down from 
Heaven to salute Mary, — then did all these greet the eye of 
the rude, unlettered man, and tell him, in language more 
eloquent than words, how much Almighty God in Heaven 



4-4 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



loved him. But it was necessary for this that this art of 
painting should be idealized to its very highest form. It 
was necessary to the painter's hand to fling around Mary's 
head a halo of virginity and of the fight of Heaven. It was 
necessary that the angelic form that saluted her should have 
the transparency of Heaven, and of its own spiritual nature, 
floating, as it were, through him in material color. It was 
necessary that the atmosphere that surrounded her should be 
as that cloudless atmosphere which is breathed before the 
Throne of the Most High. It was necessary that the man 
who looked upon this should be lifted up from the thoughts 
of earth and engaged wholly in the contemplation of objects 
of Heaven. Therefore, glimpses of beauty the most trans- 
cendent, aspirations of Heaven, lifting up the soul from all 
earthliness — from worldliness, — were necessary. In all this 
the monk was obliged to fast and pray while he painted. 
The monk was obliged to lift up his own thoughts, his own 
imagination, his own soul, in contemplation, and view, as it 
were, the scene which he was about to illustrate, with no 
earthly eye. The Church alone could do this, — and the 
Church did it. She created the art of painting. There was 
no tradition in the Pagan world to aid him ; no beauty — the 
beauty of no fair forms in all the fulness of their majestic 
symmetry before his eye to inspire him. He must look alto- 
gether to Heaven for his inspiration. And so faithfully did 
he look up to Heaven's glories, and so clear was the vision 
that the painter monk received of the beauties he depicted 
on earth, that, in the thirteenth century there arose in Flor- 
ence a Dominican monk, a member of our Order, beatified 
by his virtues, and called by the single title of " The Angelic 
Painter." He illustrated the Holy Trinity. He put before 
che eyes of the people all the great mysteries of our faith. 
And when, after generations of ages— after six hundred years 
have passed away, whenever a painter, or lover of art, stands 
before one of those wonderful angels and saints painted by 
the hand of the ancient monk, now in Heaven, it seems to 
him as if the very angels of God had descended from on 
high and stood before the painter while he fixed their glory 
in colored form, as they appear to the eye of the beholder. 
It seems as if we gazed upon the blessed angelic hosts, and as 
if Gabriel, standing before Mary, mingled the joy of the 
meeting with the solemnity of the message which the painter 
represents him as announcing. It seems as if Mary is seen 
receiving the message of man's redemption from the angel, 
not as a woman of earth, but as il she was the very personifi- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



45 



cation of the woman that the inspired Evangelist at Patmos 
saw, " clothed with the sun, and the moon nnder her feet, and 
on her head a crown of twelve stars." Michael Angelo, the 
greatest of painters, gazed in wonder at the angels and saints 
that the Dominican monk had painted. Astonished, he knelt 
down, gave thanks to God, and said, " The man that could 
have painted these must have seen them in Heaven ! " 

The architecture of the ancient world, of Greece and of 
Rome, remained. It was inspired by a Pagan idea, and it 
never rose above the idea that inspired it. The temples of 
Athens and of Rome remained in all their shattered glory, and 
in all the chaste beauty of their proportions. Very remarka- 
ble are they as architectural studies for this ; that they 
spread themselves out, and covered as much of the earth's 
space as possible ; that the pillars were low and the arches 
low; and everything seemed to cling to and tend towards 
earth. For this was the idea, and the highest idea of ar- 
chitecture that ever entered into the mind of the great- 
est of the men of ancient civilization. The monk in his 
cloister, designing to build a temple and a house for the liv- 
ing God looking upon the models of ancient Greece and Rome, 
saw in them a grovelling and an earthly architecure. His 
mind was heavenward in aspiration. His thoughts, his affec- 
tons, were all purified by the life which he led. Out of that 
upward tendency of mind and heart sprang the creation — the 
invention — the new creation — of a new style of Christian 
architecture which is called the Gothic : as little in it of earth 
as may be — just sufficient to serve the purpose of a super-struc- 
ture. The idea was to raise it as high towards Heaven as it 
could be — to raise a monument to Almighty God — a monu- 
ment revealing in every detail of its architecture the Divine 
idea, and the upward tendency of the regenerated heart of 
the Christian man. Now, therefore, let every arch be 
pointed ; now therefore, let every pillar spring up as loftily as 
a spire ; now, therefore, let every niche be filled with angels 
and saints, — some who were tried in love — others who main- 
tained the faith, — teaching the lesson of their sanctity — now 
pronouncing judgment, now proclaiming mercy. ISTow, there- 
fore, let the high tower be uplifted on which swings the bell, 
consecrated by the blessing of the Church, to fling out upon 
the air around, which trembles as it receives its message, the 
notes of Christian joy and of Christian sorrow ! And high 
above that tower let the slender pointed spire seek the clouds, 
and rear up as near to Heaven as man can go the symbol of 
the Cross on which Christ redeemed mankind ! Such is the 



46 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



Church's idea ; and such is the architecture of which she is 
the mother ! Thus we behold the glorious churches of the 
middle ages. Thus we behold them in these ancient and 
quaint towns of Belgium and of France. We behold on 
their transepts, for instance, a tracery as fine as if it were 
wrought and embroidered by a woman's hands, with a 
strength that has been able to defy the shocks of war and 
the action of ages. If the traveller seeks the sunny plains of 
Italy, he climbs the snow crowned, solitary Alps, and there 
after his steep and rugged ascent, he beholds on one side 
the valleys of Switzerland, with its cities and lakes, and he 
turns to the land of the noon-day sun, and sees before him, 
the fair and wide-spread plains of Lombardy. The great 
rivers flow through these plains and look as if they were of 
molten silver. The air is pure, and the sky is the sky of 
Italy. Majestic cities dot the plains at his feet. But among 
them all, as the sun flings his Italian light upon the scene, — 
among them all, he beholds one thing that dazzles his eyes 
with its splendor. There, far away in the plains, within the 
gates of the vast city of Milan, he sees a palace of white mar- 
ble rising up from the earth ; ten thousand statues of saints 
around it ; with countless turrets, and a spire with a pin- 
nacle rising towards Heaven, as if in a riot of Christian joy. 
The sun sparkles upon it as if it were covered with the rime 
of a hoar frost, or as if it were made of molten silver. Possi- 
bly his steps are drawn thither, and it pleases him to enter the 
city. Never before — never, even with the eye of the mind 
— had the traveller seen so grand an idea of the sacred 
humanity of J esus Christ ! Here He reigns ! Who can 
deny the historical facts which I have narrated ? Who can 
deny that if to-day our ear is charmed with the sound of 
music — our eye delighted with the contemplation of paintings 
— our hearts within us lifted up at the sight of some noble 
monument of architecture — who can deny with such facts 
before him that it was the Church that ^created these — that 
she is the mother of these — and that she brought them forth 
from out the chaos and the ruin that followed the destruction 
of the pagan civilization. Thus while she was their mother, 
she was also their highest inspiration. For, remember, that 
the zeal in art may be taken from earth, or drawn from 
Heaven. Art may aspire to neither more nor less than " to 
hold the mirror to nature." The painter, for instance, may 
aspire to nothing more than to render faithfully, as it is in 
nature, a herd of cattle, or a busy scene in the town. The 
musician may aspire to nothing more than the pleasure 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 47 

which his music will give to the sense of the voluptuous in man.. 
The architect may aspire to nothing more than the creation, 
in a certain space, of a certain symmetry of proportion, and 
a certain usefulness in the work of his hands. They may 
" hold the mirror up to nature;" but this is not a perfect 
idealization of art. The true ideal holds the mirror of its 
representation not only up to nature, to copy that nature 
faithfully, but — higher still — to God, to catch one ray of 
divine inspiration, one ray of divine light, one ray of heavenly 
instruction, and to fling that pure heavenly light over the 
earthly productions of his art. This pious inspiration is only 
to be found in the Catholic Church. It is found in her music 
— those strains of hers which we call the " Gregorian chant," 
— which, without producing any very great excitement, or 
pleasure, yet fall upon the ear, and, through the ear, upon the 
soul, with a calming, solemn influence, and seem to speak to 
the affections in the very highest language of worship. 
Plaintively do they fall — yes, plaintively, — because the 
Church of God has not yet shone over the earth in the fulness 
of her glory — plaintively, because the object of her worship 
is mainly to make reparation to an offended God for the neg- 
ligence of the sinner, — plaintively, because the w^ords which 
this music breathes are the words of the penitent, and the 
contrite of heart, — plaintively — because, perhaps, my breth- 
ren, the highest privilege of the Christian here is a holy sad- 
ness, according to the words of Him who said : " Blessed 
are they who mourn and weep, for they shall be com- 
forted." 

In the lapse of years, the Church again brought forth 
another method and gave us another school, which expresses 
to-day the pious exultation, the riot of joy, with which, on 
Christmas day, Palsestrina sung before Pope Marcellus in 
Rome. Here, for instance, the " Magnificat," as it resounds 
within the Catholic Cathedrals at the hour of prayer. Here, 
for instance, some of the hymns, time-honored and ancient, 
in which she breaks in on an Easter morning, and which she 
sets to the words — the triumphant words — of the " Alleluia i" 
Who can say — who is there with trained, sympathetic ear 
who hears them, who cannot say — that the inspiration which 
is in them is altogether of Heaven — heavenly : — and that it 
lifts up the soul to the contemplation of heavenly themes, and 
to the triumph of Jesus Christ. The highest inspiration 
came through faith. 

Let us turn to the art of painting. So long as this nobl« 
art was in the hands of the Monk — the man of God — so long 



48 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

had we master pieces of painting, such as have never been 
equalled by any that since came forth — master-pieces by men 
who fasted and prayed, and looked upon their task, as pain- 
ters, to be a heavenly and a holy one. We read of the Blessed 
Angelico, the Dominican painter, whose works are the glory 
of the world to-day, — we read of him, that he never laid his 
brush to a painting of the Mother of God, or of Our Lord, 
except on the day when he had been at Holy Communion. 
We read of him that he never painted the infant Jesus, or 
the Crucifixion, except on his knees. We read of him that 
while he brought out the divine sorrow in the Virgin Mother, 
for the Saviour on the cross— while he brought out the God- 
like tribulation of Him who suffered there — he was obliged 
to dash the tears from his eyes — the tears of love — the tears 
of compassion — which produced the high inspiration of his 
genius. Nay, the history of this art of painting teaches us 
that all the great masters were eminent as religious men, and 
that when they separated from the Church, as we see, their 
inspiration left them. The finest paintings that Raphael ever 
painted were those which he painted in his youth, while his 
heart was yet pure, and before the admiration of the world 
had made him stain the integrity of his soul by sin. The 
rugged, the almost omnipotent genius of Michael Angel o 
was that of a man deeply impressed with faith, and most 
earnestly devoted to the practice of his religion. Whether 
in the Vatican of Rome, or over the high altar of the Sistine 
Chapel, he brings out all the terrors of the Divine Judgment, 
;which he puts there, in a manner that makes the beholder 
tremble to-day — the Lord in the attitude, not of blessing, but 
of sweeping denunciation over the heads of the wicked, — he 
took good care, by prayer, by frequenting the sacraments, by 
frequent confession and communion, and by the purity of his 
life, to avert the punishments that he painted from falling on 
his own head. The most glorious epoch in the history of 
architecture was precisely that in the thirteenth and four- 
teenth centuries, when there arose the minsters of York, of 
Westminster, of Notre Dame, in Paris; of Rouen, and all 
the wonderful old churches that, to-day, are the astonishment 
of the world, for the grandeur and majesty of their propor- 
tions, and the beauty of design they reveal. These churches 
sprang up at the very time that the Church alone held undis- 
puted sway ; when all the arts were in her hands, and when 
the architects who built them were nearly all consecrated 
sons of the cloister. It is worthy of remark that we do not 
know the name of the architect that built St. Patrick's, ol 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



49 



Christ Church, in Dublin. We do not know the name of the 
architect that built Westminster Abbey, nor any one of these 
great and mighty mediaeval churches throughout Europe. 
We know, indeed, the name of the architect who built St. 
Paul's in London, and of him who built St. Peter's, in Rome. 
They were laymen. The men who laid the foundations (that 
rarely appear to the eye) were Monks, and are now in the 
dust ; and, in their humility, they brought the secret of their 
genius to the grave, and no names of theirs are emblazoned 
on the annals of the world's fame. 

Thus we see the highest civilization, the highest inspira- 
tion of the arts — music painting and architecture, — came 
from the Catholic Church, — and that the most attractive of 
them all was created in her cloisters. The greatest painters 
that ever lived had come forth from her bosom, animated by 
her spirit. The greatest churches that ever were built were 
built and designed by her consecrated children. The grand 
strains of ecclesiastical music, expressing the highest ideas 
resounded in her cathedral churches. The world had grown 
under her fostering care. Young Republics had sprung up 
under the Church's hand and guidance. The Italian Repub- 
lics — the Republics of Florence, of Pisa, of Tuscany, of 
Genoa, — all granted their municipal rights and rights of citi- 
zenship — (rights that were established for protection, and to 
insure equality of the law,) — at the Church's dictation. Nay, 
more. The Church was ever willing and ready, both by 
legislation and by action, to curb the petty tyrants that 
oppressed the people; to oblige the rugged castellan to 
emancipate his slaves. The Church was ever ready to send 
her highest representatives, Archbishops and Cardinals, into 
the presence of Kings, to demand the people's rights ; and 
the very man who wrung the first principles of the British 
Constitution from an unwilling and tyrannical King, was the 
Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury — the only man who would 
dare to do it, for (and well the tyrant knew it) he could not 
touch the Archbishop, because the arm of the Church was out- 
stretched for his protection. Society was formed under her 
eyes and under her care. Her work now seemed to be com- 
pleted, when the Almighty God, in His wisdom, let fall a 
calamity upon the world. And I think you will agree with 
me — even such among you (if there be any) who are not 
Catholics, — that a calamity it was. A calamity fell upon the 
world in the sixteenth century, which not only divided the 
Church in faith, and separated nations from her, but which 
introduced new principles, new influences, new and hostile 



50 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



agencies which were destructive of the most sacred rights. 1 
am not here this evening so much a preacher as a 
lecturer. I am not speaking to you so much as a priest as a 
historian, and I ask you to consider this : — We are accus- 
tomed to hear on every side that Protestantism was the eman- 
cipation of the human intellect from the slavery of the Pope. 
To that I have only to answer this one word : Protestantism 
substituted the uncertainty of opinion instead of the certainty 
of faith which is in the Catholic Church. Protestantism 
declared that there was no voice on earth authorized or 
empowered to proclaim the truth of God; that the voice that 
had proclaimed it for fifteen hundred years had told a lie ; 
that the people were not to accept the teaching of the Catho- 
lic Church as an authoritative and time-honored law, but that 
they were to go out and look for the faith for themselves, 
— and in the worst way of all. Every man was to find a 
faith for himself ; and when he had found it he had no satis- 
factory guarantee, no certainty, that he had the true inter- 
pretation of the truth. If this be emancipating the intellect — ■ 
if this changing of certainty into uncertainty, dogma into 
opinion, faith into a search after faith, be emancipation of the 
intellect, then Christ must have told a lie when he said : 
" You shall know the truth : and the truth shall make you 
free !" The knowledge of the truth He declared to be the 
highest freedom — and, therefore, I hold, not as a priest, but 
simply as a philosopher, that the assertion is false which says 
that the work of Protestantism was the emancipation of the 
intellect. All the results of modern progress — all the scienti- 
fic success and researches that have been made — in a word, 
all the great things that have been done — are all laid down 
quietly at the feet of Protestantism as the effects of this 
change of religion. In England nothing is more common 
than for good Protestants to say that the reason why we are 
now in so civilized a condition is because Martin Luther set up 
the Protestant religion. Protestantism claims the electric 
telegraph. The Atlantic cable does not lie so much in a bed 
of sand as on a holy bed of Protestantism that stretches from 
shore to shore ! They forget that there is a philosophical 
axiom which says : " One thing may come after another, and 
yet it may not be caused by the thing that went before." If 
one thing comes after another it does not follow that it is the 
effect of the other. It is true that all these things have 
sprung up in the world since Protestantism appeared. It is 
perfectly true that the many have learned to read since Pro- 
testantism gained ground. But why ? Is it because the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



51 



Catholic Church kept the people in ignorance ? No ; it was 
because of a single want. It was about the time Protestant- 
ism sprung up — a little after, or a little before it — that the 
art of printing was invented. Of course the many were not 
able to read when they had no books. The Catholic Church, 
as history proved, was even far more zealous than the Pro- 
testant new-born sect, in multiplying copies of the Scripture 
and in multiplying books for the people. Now, one of the 
reproaches that is made to us to-day is that we are too busy 
in the cause of education. Surely if the Catholic Church is 
the mother of ignorance that reproach cannot be truly made. 
Now Protestants are making a noise and saying that the 
Church, in every country and on every side, is planning and 
claiming to educate ! But all this is outside of my question. 
My question deals with the fine arts. 

Now, mark the change that took place ! Protestantism 
undoubtedly weakened the Church's influence upon society. 
Undoubtedly it took out of the Church's hands a great deal 
of that power which we have seen the Catholic Church exer- 
cise, for more than a thousand years, upon the fine arts. 
They claim — or they set up a rival claim of fostering the arts 
of music, of architecture, and of painting, so that these may 
no longer claim to receive their special inspiration from the 
Church, which was their mother and their creator, and 
through which they drew their heavenly genius. Well, the 
arts were thus divided in their allegiance, and thus deprived 
of their inspiration, by the institution of this new religion. I 
ask you to consider, historically, whether that inspiration of 
art, that high and glorious inspiration, that magnificent ideal, 
was not destroyed the moment it was taken from under the 
guidance and inspiration of the Catholic Church ? I say that 
it was destroyed : and I can prove it. Since the day that 
Protestantism was founded, the art of architecture seems to 
have perished. No great cathedral has been built. No great 
original has appeared. No new idea has been expressed from 
the day that Luther declared schism in the Church, and 
warred against legitimate authority. No Protestant has 
ever originated a noble model in modern architecture. It 
has sunk down into a servile imitation of the ancient grovel- 
ling forms of Greece and Rome. Nay, whenever the ancient 
Gothic piles — majestic and inspiring Christian churches — fell 
into their hands, what did they do ? They pulled them 
down, in order to build up some vile Grecian imitation, or 
else they debased the ancient grandeur and purity of the 
Gothic cathedral, by mixing in a servile imitation of some 
ancient heathen or pagan temple. 



52 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



As to the art of painting ; the painter no longer looked up 
to Heaven for his subject. The painter no longer considered 
that his pious idea was to instruct and elevate his fellow-man. 
The painter no longer selected for his subject the Mother of 
God, or the sacred humanity of our Lord, or the angels and 
saints of Heaven. The halo of light that was shed upon the 
brush of the blessed Angelico — the halo of divine light that 
surrounded the Virgin's face as it grew under the creative 
hand of the young Christian painter — the halo of heavenly 
light that surrounded the Judge upon His throne, in the 
fresco of Michael Angelo — this is to be found only in Chris- 
tian art. The highest ambition of the painter now is to 
sketch a landscape true to nature. The highest excellence 
of art seems now to be to catch the colors that approach most 
faithfully to the flesh tints of the human body. And it is a 
remarkable fact, my friends, that the art of animal painting — 
painting cows and horses, and all these things — that it began 
with Protestantism. One of the very first animal painters 
was Roos, a German Protestant, who came to Rome, and the 
reproach of his fellow-painters was, " There is the man that 
paints the cows and horses." Even sacred subjects — even 
they were dealt with in this debased form — in this low and 
empty inspiration. How were they dealt with? Look, for 
instance, at the Magdalens ; look at the Madonnas of Rubens. 
Rubens, himself, was a pious Catholic ; yet, his paintings 
displayed the very genius of Protestantism. If he wanted to 
paint the Blessed Virgin, he selected some corpulent and 
gross looking woman, in whom he found some ray of mere 
sensual beauty that struck his eye, and he put her on the can- 
vas, and held her up before men as the Virgin, whose prayer 
was to save, and whose power was above that of the angels. 
The artist who would truly represent her on canvas must 
Tjave his pencils touched with the purity and grandeur of 
Heaven ! 

Music : Music lost its inspiration when it fell from under 
the guidance of the Church. No longer were its strains the 
echoes of Heaven. ~No longer is the burden of the hymn the 
heavenly aspiration of the human soul, tending towards its 
last and final beatitude. Oh, no ! but every development 
that this high and heavenly science receives, is a simple 
degradation into the celebration of human passion ; into the 
magnifying of human pride: into the illustration of all that 
is worst and vilest in man: and the highest theme of the 
musician to-day is not the " Dies Ira3," — an expression, as it 
were, of the prayers of the angels in Heaven for the dead 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



52 



— it is not the " Stabat Mater," the wailing voice of the 
Virgin's sorrow; it is not the " Alleluia," to proclaim to the 
world the glories of the risen God : no, the highest theme of 
the musician to-day is to take up some story of sensual, and 
merely human, love; to set that forth with all the charms, 
and all the meretricious embellishments of art. Thus do we 
behold in our own experience of to-day how the arts went 
down, and lost their inspiration, as soon as there were taken 
from them the genius and the inspiring influence of the 
Church that created them, and through them civilized the 
world and brought to us whatever we have of civilization and 
refinement in this nineteenth century. Thank God the reign of 
evil cannot last long upon this earth. It is one of the mys- 
terious circumstances that the coming of our Lord developed. 
Before the Incarnation of the Son of God, an evil idea seemed 
to be in the nature of man. It propagated itself, it found a 
home, and an abiding dwelling among the children of men. 
But since the Incarnation of the Son of God, since the Eternal 
Word of God vouchsafed to take a human soul, a human 
body, human sensibilities, and, I will add, human genius, — 
since that time the base and the vile, and the ephemeral, and 
the degraded, may come; may debase art and artists, may spoil 
the spirit of art for a time, — but it cannot last very long. 
There is a native force, a nobleness in the soul of man 
that rises in revolt against it. And to-day, even to-day, the 
hour of revival seems to be coming — almost arrived — is 
already come. The three arts — of Painting, of Music, and 
Architecture seem to be rising with their former inspiration, 
and seem to catch again a little of the departed light that 
was shed on them and flowed through them, from religion. 
Architecture revives, and the glories of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, though certainly they may not be eclipsed, yet they 
are almost equalled by the glories of the nineteenth. But a 
short distance from this, you gee, in the middle of a great 
city, and behold rising in its wonderful beauty, that which 
promises to be and is to be, of all the glories of this city, the 
most glorious — the great cathedral. Across the water you 
see in the neighboring city of Brooklyn the fair and magnif- 
icent proportions of that which will be in a few years the 
glory of that adjacent shore, when on this side, and on 
that, each tower, and spire and pinnacle, upholding an 
angel or saint, the highest of all will uphold the Cross of 
Jesus Christ! Music is reviving again, — catching again 
the pure spirit of the past. A taste for the serene, the 
pure, the most spiritual songs of the Church, is every day 



54 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



gaining ground, and taking hold of the imagination. Paint- 
ing, thank God, is reviving again, and of this you, have hero 
abundant proof. Look around you ! ~No gross, earthly fig- 
ure stands out in the bare proportions of flesh and blood ! 
No vile exposure of the mere flesh invites the eye of the vol- 
uptuous to feast itself upon the sight ! The purity of God 
is here. The purity of the Church of God overhangs it, and 
the story of these scenes will go home to your hearts and to 
the hearts of your children, as the story that the blessed 
Angelico told in Forence six hundred years ago ! Thanks be 
to God it is so ! Thanks be to God, that when I lift up my 
eyes I may see so much of the purity of the face down which 
flow the last tears of blood ! When I lift up mine eyes here it 
seems to me as if I stood bodily in the holy society of these 
men. It seems to me that I see in the face of John tha 
expression of the highest manly sympathy that comforted 
and consoled the dying eyes of the Saviour. It seems to me 
that I behold the Blessed Virgin whose maternal heart consen- 
ted in that hour of agony to be broken for the sins of men. 
It seems to me that I behold the Magdalen as she clings to the 
Cross, and receives upon that hair with which she wiped His 
feet, the drops of His blood. It seems to me that I behold 
that heart, humbled in penance and inflamed with love — the 
heart of the woman who had loved much, and for whom He 
had prayed. It seems to me that I travel step by step, to Cal- 
vary, and learn, as they unite in Him, every lesson of suffer- 
ing, of peace, of hope, of joy, and of divine love ! 

Thank God, it is fitting in a Dominican Church that this 
should be so ! It is fitting in a temple of my order that, when 
I look upon the image of my Holy Father over that entrance, 
in imagination, and without an effort, I travel back to the 
spot where I had the happiness to live my student days, and 
where, in the very cell in which I dwelt, I beheld from 
Angelico's own hand one glorious specimen of his art. These 
are the gladness of our eyes ; the joy of our hearts. They 
give us reason to rejoice with Him who said : "I have loved, 
O Lord, the beauty of Thy house, and the place where Thy 
glory dwelleth ! " They give us reason to rejoice because 
they are not only fair and beautiful in themselves, but they 
are also the guarantee and the promise that the traditions of 
ecclesiastical painting, sculpture, architecture and music in 
this new country, will yet come out and rival all the glories 
of the nations that for centuries and centuries have upheld 
the Cross. They are a cause of gladness to us, for, when we 
shall have passed away, our children, and our children's 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



55 



children shall come here, and, in reviewing these pictures, 
will learn to feel the love of Jesus Christ. Among the tradi- 
tions of the city of Ghent, in Belgium, there is one of a little 
boy who grew up, visiting every day the Cathedral of the 
city. One day he stood with wondering and child-like eyes 
before a beautiful painting of the infant Jesus. According as 
time went on, and reason grew upon him, his love for the pic- 
ture became greater and greater ; and when he became a man, 
his love for it was so great that he spent his days in the 
Cathedral as organist, pealing forth the praises of the Son of 
God. His manhood went down into the vale of years, but 
his love for the picture was still the one child-love — the young 
love and passion of his heart. And so he lived, a child of 
art, and died in the odor of sanctity, of God. And that art- 
had fulfilled its highest mission, for it had sanctified the soul 
of a man. O, may these pictures that we look upon with so 
much pleasure — may they teach to you, and to your children 
after you, the lesson they are intended to teach, of the love, 
of the charity, of the mercy of Jesus ; that — loving Him and 
loving the beauty of His house, and catching every gleam 
that faith reveals of her higher beauty, and everything that 
speaks of Him forever, you may come to behold Him as He 
shines in the uncreated light and majesty of His glory ! 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A speech delivered a: Delmonico's, Fourteenth Street, Xew York, 
by the Bev. Fathee Beeke, on the occasion of ike Eleventh Annual 
Dinner of the " Knights of St. Patrick," Monday evening, March IS,] 

"BANQUET OP THE HEIGHTS OE ST. PATEICK.' ' 

I cannot forget that I have the distinguished honor of 
addressing the <; Knights of St. Patrick ! " ? I am aware that 
there is another body that claims that glorious title. I am 
aware that within those aisles, and under that vault in the 
roof that resounded to the preaching of Ireland's greatest 
saints, and (though I am a priest. I will add) — resounded to 
the voice of one of her greatest sons — the immortal Swift — 1 
there still hang the banners of the men who call themselves 
the " Knights "of St. Patrick!" But, when I reflect that 
these men were, nearly all of them, aliens to the nation in 



50 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



birth, and many aliens in religion ; when I reflect that there 
are among the highest names emblazoned upon those ban- 
ners those of men who have come down in the recollections 
of history with the curse of every honest man — of every 
Irishman — upon them ; when I remember that in the front 
rank of these so-called Knights of Patrick, I find the scut- 
cheon and the names of men who would consider it the great- 
est insult if any one suspected that they were Irishmen, 
simply because they have none of the grace of God, and but 
little of the grace of man around them (cheers) ; when I 
reflect upon this, and upon much more, I reject and repudiate 
their claims to so high and so honored a name as that of 
Ireland's Apostle. And, I feel, as an Irishman — as a priest, 
that I am addressing the true Knights of St. Patrick — the 
" Knights without fear, and without reproach," the only men 
who can lay claim to the title of " Knights of St Patrick ! " 
(cheers). You have asked me to speak to you of "The day 
we celebrate." Ah, my dear Knights, there are many things 
that make us singular among the nations of the earth. We 
are singular in our misfortunes ; we are also singular in our 
glory. And, perhaps, among Ireland's glories, not the least, 
if not the first, is this : She points to the man who brought to 
her the light of her Divine faith, and of her holy religion — 
and she points to him, not only as the Apostle of the super- 
natural among her children, but also the very father of her 
history, and the framer of her national destinies (cheers). 
Every other nation of which we read has two distinct lines of 
history — viz., the human, the natural, the worldly, the epical, 
— and side by side with that, running parallel with it, and 
very often in a small and contracted channel, the stream of 
its faith. But, when we come to Ireland, what do we find ? 
We find her history enveloped in a cloud of uncertainty and 
confusion, until the day when Patrick's voice was heard, pro- 
claiming the name of the true Lord and the true God, — until 
the day when Patrick's light blazed upon the land, and upon 
all that it had had previously of civilization and of human 
glory — until the day Ireland put her hand into that of her 
Apostle, and, with him, emerged from the pre-historic obscur- 
ity that surrounded her, into the full light and blaze of the 
world's admiring observation (cheers). What do we know 
of that glorious and honored land ? What do we know of 
the history of that sacred soil — the bare recollection of whose 
green hills overpowers me to-night with emotion? — for the 
wide ocean roils between me and that dear Mother Land ! 
(cheers). What do we know of her history save the few 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



5? 



fabulous records — the few uncertain notes that tell us of her 
most ancient glory, until Patrick came? Fifty years after 
Patrick's voice had been heard in the land the whole world 
unites in proclaiming the far green Western Isle the home and 
mt ther of saints and doctors. To-day the history of Ireland 
as all but unknown, shrouded and enveloped in the gloom of 
fable ; to-morrow, at the magic sound of her great apostle's 
voice, the veil is rent, and forth comes the nation not only 
into " the wonderful light " of Christianity, but also into the 
full blaze of historic glory (cheers). Therefore, my friends, 
it was not unfitting that when I am called on to speak of the 
day we celebrate, it is not so much St. Patrick's Day as Ire- 
land's day (cheers). Fifteen hundred years have passed over 
since that day dawned — a long lease of time and of experience 
— and we — we, children of the soil — we, men of Irish blood, 
of Irish traditions, of Irish antecedents — (and, I will add — 
and thanks be to God !) — of Irish brains (great cheering) — we 
are come here this evening, and, 

" Far from the hills of Innisfall, 
We meet in love to-night, 
Some of the scattered Clan-na-Gael, 
With spirits warm and bright. 
Why do we meet ? 'tis to repeat 
Our vows, both night and day. 
To dear old Ireland, brave old Ireland, 
Ireland, boys ! Hurra ! " 

(Great cheering.) Well, my text tells me that the day we 
celebrate is " honored and loved by Irishmen all the world 
over ! " I see around me many men distinguished in every 
walk of life. I will address myself more especially to 
a man (General McDowell) whose name has filled my 
mind before I had the honor of addressing him — a man 
whose profession comes nearest my own ; for, although I am 
a man of extreme peace, yet, in the Church of God, extremes 
meet ; and, General, there is no man who comes so near to 
you, who are a man of war, as the friar (cheers). General, 
there was a man of my order, wearing my habit, whose name, 
spoken in the language of the nineteenth century, will resound 
upon the trumpet tones of fame, up to the last day of the 
world's history — the immortal Lacordaire ! (loud cheers). 
Speaking from his pulpit in Notre Dame, he proclaimed in 
that Church — that Catholic Church ! — that the first duty of 
a nation was to recognize its God : its next duty was to be 
able to draw the sword (enthusiastic cheering). That sword 
may be drawn, and disaster may follow its drawing. For a 



58 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



day, for a month, for a year, for centuries, the cause in which 
it is drawn may be a losing cause, — the bravest and the best 
men that ever lived have known the anguish of the evening 
of defeat : — but if that cause be just and holy — if the 
hand that draws the sword in that cause be brave and manly 
— if the heart that nerves that hand be noble and generous, — 
sooner or later, though the triumph may be put off for centu- 
ries — sooner or later, an Angel of the God of Justice will 

descend from Heaven, and (the conclusion of the sentence 

was lost in a storm of cheering). I am told in the words of 
this toast what my own heart has already told me, that this 
" day we celebrate" is to be honored and loved by every 
man, unto the ends of the earth, who has the honor and the 
glory of calling himself an Irishman (cheers). Why is it to 
be honored ? Why is it to be loved ? Does it tell us of 
triumph ? Ah, Knights of St. Patrick ! Ah, men who this 
night would be willing to draw the sword, if the occasion 
presented itself! Ah, men who may yet, perhaps, have the 
privilege — or whose children may yet have the privilege of 
unsheathing Ireland's sword, — I say to you this day that we 
celebrate, and that we are called upon to honor and love, tells 
us very little of triumph. Three hundred years of peace, of 
sunshine and joy followed Patrick's day in Ireland. Three 
hundred years that showed the Irish nation in its scholars, in 
its schools, in its universities, the admiration of Christendom, 
the glory of the world, and the land of saints ! But the 
three hundred years closed at the close of the eighth century ; 
and we are now at the close of the nineteenth century, — and 
from the close of the eighth century, for more than a thou- 
sand years — for eleven hundred years and more — Ire- 
land's history has been a story of constant, and sustained, 
and unremitting conflict and war ! And, therefore have 
I spoken to the soldier among us. He, more than any 
man here, can appreciate — (as, indeed, we all can 
appreciate each in his way) — that strange and cheq- 
uered, yet glorious, history of eleven hundred years of 
ceaseless war. At the end of the eighth century Ire- 
land was invaded by the Danes. Army after army poured 
down upon her from the northern coasts and from the Baltic 
sea, — from the northern coasts of Scotland — and the German 
sea, for miles, was covered with their galleys — covered with 
glittering shields — filled with those fair-haired, blue-eyed 
Northmen — singing their war-songs to the sweep of their 
long oars. For three hundred years, every year saw a new 
army poured into Ireland; — Ireland standing at bay, sword 



THE CATHOLIC MIS SI 0". 



50 



in hand — that sword that was never sheathed (faring these 300 
years — and, at the end of the eleventh century, uniting as one 
man, Ireland rose in her strength, shook these barbarians 
into the sea from off her virgin bosom — and the Danes, that 
were able to overpower England — that were able to conquer 
all the northern coast of France — that were able to leave the 
signs of their empire in Scotland, which remain even up to 
this very day — were cast from the shores of Ireland by a 
supreme effort of the then national strength; and that was 
after three hundred years, the issue of Ireland's invasion by 
the Northmen (cheers). Now, I love my mother land so 
dearly that I made the study of her history one of the most 
engrossing occupations of my youth and of my manhood: — ■ 
and I say deliberately — and I think the distinguished gentle- 
man (Mr. O'Gorman) at my right, who knows Irish history 
perhaps as well as any riving man — (cheers) — will agree with 
me in this: that the true secret of Ireland's victory over the 
Danes was this — that these Northern barbarians swept down 
upon the Irish coast with the openly avowed and declared 
determination to sweep away Patrick's faith, Patrick's relig- 
ion, Patrick's name; and, with it, to sweep away every ves- 
tige of Ireland's freedom and her nationality (cheers). But 
it was the magic sound of Patrick's name — Patrick's faith — 
Patrick's truth — that nerved the nation and united it as one 
man — the issue of which union was the glorious victory upon 
that Good Friday at Clontarf (cheers). I need not tell you 
— the General will tell you — what is the meaning of three 
hundred years of war — three hundred years of constant invas- 
ion — three hundred years of army after army sweeping down, 
as some of your Generals swept down, for instance, the Shen- 
andoah Valley (cheers and laughter) — three hundred years 
at the mercy of the invader, — the people left to the fury of 
whatever army gained the victory of the day ! Where, in 
the history of the nations is there a people able to stand — a peo- 
ple that would stand — three hundred years of constant inva- 
sion, and come forth with all the vigor of their youth — with 
all the strength of their divine faith intact in them — while 
for three hundred years they had to bear the brunt of perse- 
cution and invasion ! (Cheers.) The world furnishes nothing 
like it. And I say Ireland is singular among the nations in 
this first great issue of her straggle. Scarcely had the Danes 
passed away — scarcely had the name of Brian been pro- 
claimed in song as the first and greatest of Ireland's Kings, 
— scarcely had the voice of the minstrel ceased, — the minstrel 
who filled with his wailing the halls of Kincora, on the 



60 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



green hills by the banks of the Shannon when the second 
period of Ireland's history began. The Anglo-Norman landed 
in an evil hour, and, — accursed of God, accursed of the 
Irish nation, accursed of the genius of history, — he set his 
mailed foot on the sacred soil of St. Patrick's inheritance in 
Ireland (cheers). And now began another war of invasion. 
Exhausted after the three hundred years of the Dane — the 
nation bleeding from every pore — the nation scarcely able to 
recover somewhat its breath — the nation unfortunately divi- 
ded in its councils, its sovereignty disputed, its people disuni- 
ted upon the various petty issues that formed the politics of 
the time, — the nation exhausted almost to utter atrophy and 
death, — finds itself suddenly obliged to rise up and face the 
new and terrible invaders. Ireland arose. Ireland rose — but 
O God ! — it was no longer as one man. Ireland rose to meet 
Fitzstephen and his hordes upon the plains of Wexford. Ire- 
land rose in the hope that, as she had cast the Danes into the 
sea, so she would be able to shake from her pure and virginal 
bosom those new invaders who had come to pollute her soil. 
While with the one hand she struck the Norman, with the 
other she was obliged to defend herself against her petty and 
her traitorous Irish chieftains ! Ah, sad, sad is that day in 
Ireland's history ! the day that tells us how, on one battle- 
field, so many Normans or Saxons were slain by the arms of 
Ireland's sons, while it tells us that, upon the same day, and 
upon a neighboring battle-field, two Irish chieftains shed, in 
domestic feuds, the blood that belonged, not to them, but to 
their country (cheers) ! We fought for four hundred years — 
from the year 1169 to the year 1549 — and it was only after 
four hundred years that an English King ventured to declare 
himself " Lord of Ireland ! " The four hundred years were 
over. The chieftains of Ireland were ruined. The great 
houses were destroyed. The heart of the nation was broken. 
And, in the year 1549, the Irish Lords and Commons, assem- 
bled in Parliament, made up their minds that it was better 
to sheathe the sword— the sword that for four hundred years 
had never seen its scabbard — but was still wielded in the 
glorious fight for Ireland's national existence. I agree it was 
better for Ireland to sheathe the sword, and let the tired arm 
of the nation rest. The sword was sheathed. Ireland sol- 
emnly, by the voice of her Parliament and her chieftains, 
handed her sheathed sword into the hand — the polluted hand 
of Henry the Eighth, and declared upon bended knee, that 
she gave up the contest for nationality ; that she resigned her 
crown ; that her sceptre was broken ; and that he might take 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



CI 



the title of her " Lord/' Mark! During all these four hun- 
dred years the name of Patrick was not mentioned. The 
Norman invaders were Catholics as we were. They had 
the same faith that we had. They revered Patrick's name 
and Patrick's memory as we did. As long as Patrick's name 
was not mentioned, nor his faith impugned, it- seemed as if 
Ireland did not know the secret of success. But while 
she was yet presenting the sword of her national 
existence and of her national defence, while the hand — the 
blood-stained hand of the adulterous murderer — of the mon- 
ster in human form — was grasping the sword of Ireland's 
nationality, suddenly a voice was heard, announcing that 
England had changed her faith ! that her Catholic religion 
was given up ! and now that Henry was Lord of Ireland, he 
demands of the Irish people the surrender of their faith, and 
of all that Patrick had taught them ! Oh, Mother Erin, take 
back the sword ! take back the sword ! Ireland clutches 
the sword ; she girds it to her loins ; she girds it on in the 
name of the Lord and of Gideon : — for three hundred years 
more (loud cheering) ! General (to General McDowell), you 
have seen gallant men — brave men, exhausted after the light- 
ing of a day ! You have seen the soldier upon the battle-field 
which his valor had won ! You have seen him perhaps lie 
down exhausted after his day's fatigue, when, on a sudden 
attack, the trumpet is sounded and he is called again to 
charge the returning foe ! But tell me. General, have you 
ever heard — have you ever witnessed with your experienced 
eye — have you ever read in the history of the nations of the 
world anything more glorious than that act of Ireland taking- 
back the sword from the blood-stained hand of Henry the 
Eighth, — the girding of it again on her loins, and drawing it 
in the name of God and native land (cheers) ? I appeal to 
you [turning to Mr. O'Gorman] — to you who have known the 
fervor of hope and the chill of disappointment — to you who 
have known what it is to suffer for Ireland — to you, whose 

very name, O'Gorman [vehement cheering in which the 

close of the sentence was lost]. I appeal to you who have 
lent additional lustre to a name that has come down to you 
illustrious — a name as great as any in our history (a voice — - 
<; And Mitchel") ! Three hundred years passed away. Ah, 
the men who had fought, and fought in vain for Ireland's 
nationality might well rejoice, if it were possible to feel joy 
in the grave, when they found that a new element was intro- 
duced into the contest between Ireland and England, waged 
at this sad hour. The broken heart of Roderick O'Connoi^ 



02 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Bleeping in the cloisters of Clonmacnoise — that heart, if it 
could only rejoice, would rejoice with Irish joy in an Irish 
grave, if it could only know that now, into the contest, waa 
infused the element of Patrick's name, and Patrick's faith— 
the assurance of Ireland's triumph ! Intrenched in the citadel 
of her religion, with the light of Almighty God's divine faith 
on' her path, with the Omnipotence of God in her arm, 
with the spirit of Patrick hanging like a cloud of fire 
over her head, she entered the contest from which she came 
forth victorious ! Follow down the story, and again we 
see her crowned with victory. We have lived to see it, 
after three hundred years of struggle, that the greatest 
nation on the face of the earth sought to ex- 
tinguish the light of the faith of the people, in the blood 
of the people: and Ireland fought for her freedom, and 
triumphed for it in the sacred cause of her faith, and saved 
the almost abandoned cause of her nationality (cheers). We 
are a nation to-day ! A nation free as the bird that flies and 
wings the balmy air ; free in thought, and destined by the 
blessing of God, and the prayers of Patrick, to be free in 
every faculty of national existence, and of the national liberty 
that constitutes a nation's glory ! (Cheers.) But to the last 
part of my text, and I have done, for I am afraid I am keep- 
ing you too long (loud cries of " Go on ! go on ! "). The 
last part of my text says that each anniversary, as it recurs, 
is the dearest. Well, gentlemen, you put this into my 
hands. If you had not put into my hands, I might not say, 
perhaps, what I am about to say. I might perhaps inter- 
pret my own feelings, but I am afraid that, in interpret- 
ing them, I might not interpret yours. But, in putting this 
into my hands you let me see that your feelings and mine are 
the same, and each recurring anniversary is dearer than the 
former one. And why? Ah, gentlemen, when we are 
young and when the world opens before us, and we look upon 
it with unclimmed eyes, we see, everywhere, and on every 
side, the light of hope, and we go forth rejoicing, thinking in 
our foolish, selfish hearts, that we have within us sufficient 
elements of happiness, and Ave may make a home dear as a 
home should be. But, according as experience comes, accord 
ing as the remembrance of the friends from whom we have 
parted becomes mellowed and sanctified in the halls of mem- 
ory—according as we come to know and feel the insecurity 
of these resources on which we have relied — according as we 
meet the strange, chilling pulse of the stranger, the more 
lovingly and tenderly does the heart go back to the memory 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION, 



63 



of the days that are past and the home of our youth ; and 
therefore it is, that as age and the silver hair come to you 
here, in the same proportion does Patrick's Day, — its associa- 
tions, the very mention of it, — bring thoughts that grow 
dearer and dearer to our somewhat disappointed hearts 
(cheers). A man may thrive and succeed in this world, as 
you have, thank God ; the eloquent and distinguished lawyer 
on my right may yet be Chief Justice of the United States ; 
the brave and distinguished soldier may yet be Commander- 
in-Chief of the armies of the Great Republic; the Mayor 
of New York, whose abilities fit him to assume the 
leadership of any community in the world, may yet be 
graced with every civic dignity which the nation can confer, 
but — even if every wild hope was fulfilled — even if every 
fond aspiration found its fullest enjoyment, — there is, deep in 
the heart, within the inner chambers of the soul, one sancti- 
fied recess devoted to the fairest image and the fondest 
representation of our earliest days ; and, so long as that 
remains, so " each recurring festival of St. Patrick" will grow 
the more dear to you and to me (cheers). Nothing remains 
for me, gentlemen, but to thank you for your cheers, as I 
thank you for your patience, to congratulate you on your 
indulgence, and to congratulate myself that I did not break 
down (cheers and laughter). I remember that for the four 
years I was on the mission while in Italy, I was mistaken for 
an Italian. When I was in France, they did not think 
exactly that I was a Parisan, but they thought I was from 
somewhere in or about Brittany. But I never opened my 
mouth in England, nor committed myself to one single syl- 
lable, that my English friends did not at once find out how 
the land lay, and say: " I perceive you are Irish!" [The 
drollery of the speaker's " gesture and intonation were such 
that the company fairly roared with laughter.] The only 
answer that I was able to give them from out the light of my 
intellect, such as it is, and from out the fulness of my heart, 
was : " Glory be to God ! No merit of mine, but the pure 
condescension and mercy of the Lord conferred this upon me, 
that I have the honor and glory of calling an Irishwoman my 
mother ! " (Enthusiastic and prolonged applause, and cheer- 
ing for the " Soggarth aroon !") 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A sermon delivered in the Dominican Church, New York, on Sun- 
day, March. 24, by the Rev. Father Btjuke.J 

" THE GROUPINGS OF CALVARY." 



ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST. 



I told you this morning, my brethren, that we should con- 
fine our attention, during the next few days, to the groupings 
that surrounded our Blessed Lord upon the Hill of Calvary. 
I then intended, this evening, to put before you the various 
characters and classes of men who were there as the enemies 
of God. I must, however, alter somewhat this programme. 
To-morrow will be the Feast of the Annunciation of the 
Blessed Virgin — one of the greatest festivals of the Christian 
year — commemorating a mystery from which all the mysteries 
of our redemption have flown. It will be held, as you are 
aware, of obligation, — and, therefore, I shall be obliged so far 
to depart from my original design, as to let in, to-morrow 
evening, a sermon on the great festival of the day — the An- 
nunciation of the Blessed Virgin. Thus far I must interfere 
with the plan I have laid down, and this will oblige me, this 
evening, simply to notice briefly the different groups and 
classes by which the enemies of our Divine Lord were repre- 
sented upon Calvary. We shall pass, at once, to the consid- 
eration of the man who stood there as the friend of his dying 
Lord and Saviour. 

There were many classes of men surrounding our Blessed 
Lord on that fearful and terrible journey, when, starting from 
the house of the High Priest, Annas, He turned his face 
towards Calvary, and set out upon the dolorous " Way of the 
Cross." The men who condemned Him sitting in that tribu- 
nal were not satisfied with that sentence ; but, in the eager- 
ness of their revenge, they would fain witness his execution — 
following out the expressed word of the Evangelist, that the 
Scribes and Pharisees followed our Lord, and fed their 
revengeful eyes upon the contemplation of His three hours of 
agony on the Cross. The immediate agents of this terrible 
act of execution were the Koman soldiers of the cohort Avho 
had scourged Him, who had crowned Him with thorns, and 
who had accompanied Him with stolid indifference to the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



65 



place of His execution. They were the pagans. Ihey were 
the men who had never heard of the name of God. They 
were the men who, had they heard of it, must have heard of 
it, if at all, in a language which they scarcely understood, 
and which was the medium of the common record of what 
were called " the wonders,-' — that is, of* the miracles of 
Christ. But it scarcely stirred up in them even a natural 
curiosity : and, therefore, they brought Him to execution, as 
they would have dragged any other criminal, with this one 
exception, that, by a strange, diabolical possession, they 
looked upon this man of whom they knew nothing — upon 
this man who had never injured them in word or in deed, — 
with intense abhorrence, and hated Him with an inexplicable 
hatred. They thus typified the nation which, in the old law, 
knew not the Lord of Truth. In paganism, in the darkness 
of the wickedness of their infidelity, they knew not the name 
of God. When that name is pronounced in their presence, it 
falls upon their ears rather as the name of an enemy than 
that of a friend. They cannot explain why they hate Him. 
No more can we explain the hatred of the Roman soldiers. 
The missionary goes forth to-day in all the power of the 
priesthood of Christ. He stands in the presence of the peo- 
ple of China, or of Japan. As long as he speaks to them of 
the civilization, of the immense military power, of the riches 
and of the glory of the country from which he came, they 
hear him willingly and with interested ears. As long as he 
reveals to them any secret of human science, they make use 
of him, they are glad to receive him. Thus it is we know 
that some of the Jesuit missionaries held the very highest 
places at the court of the Emperor of China. But as soon as 
ever the missionary mentions the name of Christ, they not 
only refuse to hear him, but they are stirred up on the instant, 
with diabolical rage ; hate and anger flash from their eyes ; 
and they lay hold of the messenger who bringeth them the 
message of peace, and love, and of eternal life, and they imag- 
ine they have not fulfilled their duty until they have shed his 
heart's blood upon the spot. Oh, how vast the crowd of 
those who, for centuries, have thus greeted the Son of God 
fmd every man who speaks in His name ! Think of the out- 
lying millions, to whom, for eighteen hundred years and 
more, the Church — the messenger of God — has preached and 
appealed, but in vain ! Behold the class that was repre- 
sented round the Cross, lifting up indifferent, stolid, or, if 
anything, scowling faces, amid the woes of Him who, in that 
hour of His ag^ny and of His humiliation, mingled His pray- 



66 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ers for forgiveness with the last drop of blood that flowed 
through His wounds from His dying heart ! 

There is another class there. It is made up of those who 
knew Him well, or who ought to have known Him. They had 
seen His miracles: they had witnessed His sanctity; they had 
disputed with Him upon the laws until he had convinced them 
that His was the wisdom that could not belong to man, but 
to God. He had silenced them. He had answered every 
argument that fool-hardy and audacious men made to Him. 
He had reduced them to such shame that no man ever wanted 
to question Him again. But He interfered with their inter- 
ests and their pride. That pride revolted against submitting 
to Him. That self-love and self-interest prompted the 
thought that if He lived His light would outshine theirs, and 
their influence with the people would be gone. These 
were the Scribes and the Pharisees. They were the leaders 
of the people. They were the magistrates of Jerusalem. 
They were the men whose loud voice and authoritative tones 
were heard in the Temple. They were the men who walked 
into that house as if it was not the house of God, but their 
house. They were the men who walked fearlessly up to the 
altar, to speak words of blasphemous pride, and call them 
prayers. They were the men who tried to despise the humble 
Publican making his act of contrition. They were the men 
who lifted their virtuous hands and hypocritical eyes to 
Heaven to lament over the weakness of human nature. They 
were the men who hated Christ, because they could not argue 
with Him — because they could not uphold their errors 
against His truth — because they could not hold their own, 
but were struck dumb at the sight of His sanctity and the 
sound of His peaceful voice. What did they do ? They 
began to tell lies to the people. They began to tell the peo- 
ple how He was an impostor and a blasphemer. Tbey began 
to mislead the people, — to warp the estimate that people 
might make of Jesus Christ ! They endeavored to find false 
witnesses to bring them to swear away first His character and 
then His life. Ah ! need I say whom they represent ? Need 
I tell a people in whose memories is fresh to-day the ever 
recurring lie that is flung in the face of the Catholic Church, 
— the ever-recurring false testimony that is brought against 
her, — the burning of her churches, the defiling of her altars, 
the outrages on her priests, — the insults heaped upon her 
holy nuns, the people inflamed against the very name of Catho- 
licity itself so that the word might be fulfilled of Him who 
gaid: " They shall cast out your very name as evil for my 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



G7 



sake;" — the men who made the very name of a monk, or a 
friar, or a Jesuit mean something awfully gross, or sensual, 
or material ! These men were naturally worldly and deceit- 
ful. I need not point out to you that, in the midst of you, 
and every day from their pulpits, from their conventicles, 
through their daily press — every day we are made familiar 
with the old lie, shifted and changed, tortured, distorted and 
twisted, and the false testimony brought out in a thousand 
forms of falsehood. And there were others there who believed 
in Christ — who knew Him — who had enjoyed His conversation 
and His friendship, and who were afraid to be seen in His 
company in that dark hour, and upon that hill of shame. 
Where were the Apostles ? Where were the Disciples ? 
They had fled from their Master because it was dangerous to 
be seen with Him. Judas, the representative of the man who 
sells his religion and his God for this world ; who sells 
his conscience in order to fill his purse ; who sells every- 
thing that is most sacred when that demand is made upon 
him for temporal profit and pelf ; who seals his iniquity by a 
bad communion in order to save appearances ; and, while 
with one hand he was taking money from the Pharisees, with 
the other hand he was taking Christ to his breast ; — the man 
who played a double part — the man who did not wish to 
break utterly with his Lord, nor to sacrifice the good opinion 
of his fellow-apostles ; and, therefore he received damnation 
to himself in a bad communion, — he does not dare to climb 
the rugged steep of Calvary ; but he stands afar off : and the 
vision that he sees, of so much sorrow, so much suffering ; — 
the vision that he sees passing before his eyes ; his Lord, his 
Master in whom he still believes, though he has betrayed 
Him ; his Lord his Master, torn with scourges from head to 
foot ; crowned with thorns ; disguised in His own blood ; 
blinded with the blood that was flowing down from every 
wound in His sacred brow : — his Lord and his Master, who 
had so often spoken to him words of friendship and of love ; 
passed before the eyes of the renegade and traitor. As he 
looked, and his eyes caught, for an instant, the countenance 
of that figure tottering along in weakness and in pain, — the 
sight brought back remembrance of the days that were gone, 
with no glimmering of hope, no light of consolation to his 
soul ; but only the feeling that he had betrayed his God, and 
that he held then, in his infamous purse, the money for which 
he had sold his soul and his conscience. He stood aghast and 
pale. He tore his hair and swung his hands. He found that 
he could not live to see the consummation of his iniquity • 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



and "before the Saviour had sent forth the last cry for a re- 
deemed world, 1 he soul of the suicide Judas had gone down 
to hell ! " It were better for him had he never been born ! " 
Does he represent any class ? Are there not in this world 
men who are almost glad to have something to barter with 
the world, when they give up their holy faith and religion in 
order to clutch this world's possessions ? Have we not read 
in the history of the nations — in the history of the land from 
which most of us sprang — have we never read of men selling 
their faith for this world's riches and this world's honors ? 
Have we never read, in the history of the world, of men who, 
in order to save appearances, approached the holy altar and 
received the holy communion ? Of monarchs who, in order 
to stand well with their Catholic subjects, made a show of 
going to Holy Communion ? And of sycophants and court- 
iers who, in order to please a king, in a fit of piety or a fit of 
repentance, went to Holy Communion? But time will not 
permit me to linger in the contemplation of the many classes 
of the worldly-minded ; the false friend, the bitter, though 
conscious, enemy ; the heartless executioners, the exact rep- 
sentatives of those who crowded round the Cross in that ter 
rible hour. 

But there was one there, — and it is to that one that my 
thoughts and my heart turn this night, — there was one there 
who was destined to be, through all ages, and unto all nations, 
a type of what the true Christian man — the friend of Christ, 
must be ; a true representative of the part that he must play, 
in the sacrifice that from time to time he must make, to test 
the strength and the tenderness of his love. There was one 
there, young and beautiful, who did not flinch from his Mas- 
ter and Lord in that hour; who walked by His side ; who 
shared in the reproaches that were showered upon the head 
of the Son of God, and took his share of the grief and the 
shame of that terrible morning of Good Friday. There was 
one there whom the Master permitted to be there, that he 
might, as it were, lean upon the strength of his manhood and 
the fearlessness of his love. That one was John the Evangelist. 
Behold him, as, with the virginal eyes, he looks up as a man 
to his fellow-man on the Cross ! Behold him as he seems to 
say : " Oh, Master ! Oh, Lover of my soul and heart ! can I 
relieve you of a single sorrow by taking it up and making it 
my own ? " This was John. Consider who he was, and 
what. Three graces surrounded him as he stood at the foot 
of the Cross. Three divine gifts formed a halo of heavenly 
light around his head. They were the grace of Christian 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



69 



purity, the grace of divine love, and the manliness oi the 
"bravery that despises the world, when it is a question of giv 
ing testimony of love and of fidelity to his God and his Sav 
iour — three noble gifts, with which the world is so ill-sup- 
plied to-day ! Oh, my brethren, need I tell you that of all 
the evils in this our day, there is one which has arrived at 
such enormous proportions that it has received the name of 
"The Social Evil! " — the evil which finds its way into every 
rank and every grade of society : the evil which, raising its 
miscreated head, now and again frightens us, and terrifies the 
very world by the evidence of its wide-spread pestilence ; — 
the evil that, to-day, pollutes the heart, destroys the soul of 
the young, and shakes our nature and our manliness to its 
very foundations, and brings down the indignant and the 
sweeping curse of God upon whole nations ! Need I tell you 
that that evil is the terrible evil of impurity — the unre- 
strained passion, the foul imagination, the debased and 
degraded cravings of this material flesh and blood 
of ours, rising up in rebellion, and declaring in its 
inflamed desires that nothing of God's law, nothing of 
God's redemption shall move it ; that all, all may 
perish but it must be satiated and gorged with that food of 
lust, of which, says the holy Apostle, "the taste is death." 
Of this I have already spoken to you, and also of the opposite 
virtue, the "index" virtue, as it is called — the virtue of vir- 
tues; of that I have also spoken to you, that by which lost 
man is raised up to the very perfection of his spiritual 
nature ; by which the Divine effulgence of the highest resem- 
blance to Christ is impressed upon the soul ; by which the 
brightness of the Virgin, and of the Virgin's Son seems to 
pass forth, even from His body, and sink into the soul's 
tissues, until it becomes divine. Such virtue of angelic purity 
did Christ, our Lord, come to establish upon earth. Such 
virtue did He lay as the foundation of His Church, in a 
chaste and a virginal priesthood ; in the foundations of soci- 
ety, in a chaste and pure manhood ; preserving the integrity 
of the soul in the purity of the body. Such virtue belonged 
to John, " the disciple of love ;" and it belonged to him in its 
highest phase; for, as the Holy Fathers, — and the inter- 
preters of the Church's traditions from the very beginning, 
and notably, St. Peter of Damascus, — tell us, — John the 
Evangelist, was a virgin from the cradle to the grave. No 
thought of human love ever flashed through his mind. No 
angry uprising of human passion ever disturbed the equable 
nature of his heavenly tempered soul and body. He was the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



youngest of all the Apostles ; and he was little more than a 
youth when the virgin-creating eyes of Christ fell upon him. 
Christ looked upon him and saw a virginal body, fair and 
beautiful in its translucent purity of innocence. He the 
Creator and Redeemer, saw a soul pure, and bright, and 
unstained, — a soul just opened into manhood, and in the 
full possession of all its powers, and a tender, yet a most 
pure heart, unfolding itself even as the lily bursts forth and 
unfolds its white leaves to gather in its calyx the dews of 
Heaven, like diamond drops in its heart of glorious innocence. 
So did our Lord behold it unfold in the fair soul of 
John. In his earliest youth, dropped in that virgin ear 
the words of invitation; and in that virgin soul those 
graces of Apostleship, and of love, and of tenderness, 
and of strength, that lay there among those petals of 
glory, brought forth in the soul of the young man, all 
that was radiant with the most Christ-like virtue. A vir- 
gin — that is to say, one who never let a thought of his mind, 
nor an affection of his heart stray from the highest form of 
Divine love : thus was he before he had beheld the face of 
his Redeemer. But, when, to that virginal purity, which 
naturally seeks the love of God in its highest form, when 
that God made Himself visible to it in the shape of the sacred 
humanity of our Lord : when the virgin's King, the Prince, 
and the leader of the Virgin's choir in Heaven, presented 
Himself to the eyes of the young Apostle, oh, then, with the 
instinct of purity, his heart seemed to go forth from him 
and to seek the heart of Christ. And so it was for three 
years, under the purifying eyes of our Lord. He lived for 
three years in the most intimate communion of love with his 
Master ; distinguished from all the other Apostles, of whom 
we do not know that ever one of them was a virgin, but only 
John ; distinguished from them by being admitted, through 
his privileged virginal purity, into the inner chambers of 
the heart of Christ. Thus, when our Lord appeared to the 
Apostles upon the waters, all the others shrank from Him, 
terrified ; and they said to each other, " It is a ghost ! It is 
an appearance ! " John looked, and instantly recognized his 
Master, and said to Peter : " Don't be afraid ! It is the 
Lord ! " Whereupon, St. Jerome says : — " What eyes were 
those of John, that could see that which others could not 
see ? Oh, it was the eye of a virgin recognizing a virgin ! " 
So it was that a certain tacit privilege was granted to John, 
as is seen in the conduct of the Apostles themselves. Peter, 
certainly, was honored above all the others by getting prece- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIOX. 



71 



dence and supremacy ; by being appointed the Vicar and 
representative of bis Master ; in other words, " the head of 
the Apostles." But this was followed up. He was privileged, 
nay more, the heart of Peter was sounded to the very depths 
of its capacity, and of its love, before Christ, our Lord ap- 
pointed him as His representative. Three times did he ask 
him, " Lovest thou me ? " Again in the presence of John, 
" Lovest thou Me, Peter, more than these ? " More than 
these ; more than the men who are present before me, and of 
whom I speak to you. And Peter was confirmed in that 
hour, and rose, by Divine grace, to a height in the sight of 
his Divine Master, greater than any ever attained by man. 
It is not the heart of the man loving the Lord, but it is the 
heart of the Lord loving the man. So Peter was called upon 
to love his Lord more than the others. The tenderest love 
of his divine Master was the privilege of John. He was the 
disciple " whom Jesus loved." And well did his fellow- Apos- 
tles know it. Therefore, on the morning of resurrection, 
vrhen the Magdalen announced to the world, " The Lord is 
risen," Peter and John ran at once to the tomb where they 
had laid Him. Peter ran first, but he did not enter. John came 
and entered. Who can tell what he saw ? What a privilege 
was not that which was given to John at the Last Supper 
because of his virginal purity ? There was the Master and 
there were the disciples around him. There was the man 
whom he had destined to be the first Pope, — the representa- 
tive of His power and head of His followers. Did 
Peter get the first place? The first place — the place next 
to the left side — nearest the dear heart side was the 
privilege of John. And — oh ! ineffable dignity vouch- 
safed by our Saviour to His virgin friend ! — the 
head of the disciple was laid upon the breast of the Master, 
and the human ear of John heard the pulsations of the virgi- 
nal heart of Christ, the Lord of earth and Heaven ! Between 
those two, in life, you may easily see in this and others such 
traits recorded in the Gospel ; between these two — the Master 
and the disciple whom He loved, — there was a silent inter- 
communion — an intensity of tender love of which the Apos- 
tles seem not to have known. Out of this very purity of John 
sprang the love of his Divine Lord and Master. It was after 
His resurrection that our Lord asked Peter, " Dost thou 
love Me more than these ? " Before the suffering and death 
of the Son of God. Peter did not love Him only as a man 
loved him. John's love knew no change. Peter's love had 
first to be humbled, and then purified by tears, and the heart 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



broken by contrition before he was able to assert : " Lord, 
Thou knowest all things : Thou knowest that I love Thee ! " 
But in the love of St. John we find an undoubting, an 
unchanging love. What his Master was to him in the hour 
: f His glory the same was He in the hour of His shame. He 
□Cheld his Lord, shining on the summit of Tabor on the day 
of His Transfiguration ; yet he loved Him as dearly when He 
beheld Him covered with shame and confusion on the Cross ! 
What was the nature of that love ? Oh, my friends, think 
what was the nature of that love ! Had it taken possession 
of a mighty but an empty heart ? Mighty in its capacity of 
love is the heart of man — the heart of the young man — the 
heart of the ingenuous, talented and enlightened youth. 
Would you know how much love this heart is capable of? 
Behold it in the saints of the Catholic Church, Behold it in 
every man who gives his heart to God wholly and entirely. 
Behold it even in the sacrifices that young hearts make, 
when they are filled with merely human love. Behold it 
in the sacrifice of life, of health, of everything which a man 
has, which is made upon the altar of his love, even when that 
human love has taken the base, revolting form of impurity. 
Look at it. Measure it, if you can. I address the heart of 
the young man, and he cannot see it ! The truth of it lies 
here, that the most licentious and self-indulgent sinner on 
the face of the earth has never yet known, in the indulgence 
of his wildest excesses, the full contentment, the complete 
enjoyment, the mighty faculty of love which is in the heart. 

Such was the heart which our Lord called to him. Such 
was the heart of John. It was a capacious heart. It was 
the heart of a young man. It was empty. No human love 
was there. No previous affection came in to cross or counter- 
act the designs of God in the least degree, or to take possess- 
ion of the remotest corner, even, of that heart. Then, find- 
ing it thus empty in its purity, thus capacious in its nature, 
the Son of God filled the heart of the young Apostle with 
His love. Oh, it was the rarest, the grandest friendship that 
ever existed on this earth: the friendship that bound together 
two virgin hearts — the heart of the beloved disciple, John; 
the grand virgin love which absorbed John's affections, filling 
his young heart and intellect with the beauty and the highest 
appreciation of his Lord and Master, filling his senses with 
the charms ineffable produced by the sight of the face 
of the Holy One. He looked upon the beauty of that 
sacred and Divine humanity ; and he saw with the penetra- 
ting eyes of the intellect the fullness of the Divinity that 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



flashed upon him. He, at least, had listened to the words of 
the Divine Master, and sweeter it was than the music which 
he heard in Heaven, and which he describes in the Apocalypse, 
where he says : " They heard the sound of many voices, and 
they heard the harpers harping upon many harps." Far 
sweeter than the echoes of Heaven that descended into his 
soul on the Isle of Patmos, was the noble, manly voice of his 
Lord and Master, — now pouring forth blessings upon the 
poor, — now telling those who weep that they shall one day 
be comforted, — now whispering to the widow of Nain, 
" Weep no more ;" now telling the penitent Magdalen, " Thy 
sins are forgiven thee because thou hast loved much !" — now, 
thundering in at the temple of Jerusalem until the very 
stones resounded to the God-like manifestation of Him who 
said : "It is written that my house is a house of prayer, but 
you have made it a den of thieves :" — it was still the loftiest 
music and melody — the harmonious roll of the voice of God 
— as it fell upon the charmed ears of the enraptured Evan- 
gelist, — the young man who followed his Master and fed his 
soul upon that Divine love. Out of this love sprang that in- 
separable fellowship that bound him to Christ. Not for an 
instant was he voluntarily absent from his Master's side. 
Not for an instant did he separate himself from the immediate 
society of his Lord. And herein lay the secret of his love ; 
— for love, be it human or Divine, craves for union, and lives in 
the sight and in the conversation of the object of its affection; 
consequently, of all the Apostles, John was the one who was 
always clinging around his Master — always trying to be 
near Him — always trying to catch the loving eyes of Christ 
in every glance. This was the light of his brightness, — the 
Divine wisdom that animated him ! 

How distinct is the action of John, in the hour of the Pas- 
sion, from that of Peter ! Our Divine Lord gave warning to 
Peter. "Peter," He says, " before the cock crows you will 
deny me thrice." No wonder the master's voice struck ter- 
ror into the heart of the Apostle ! And yet, strange to say, 
it did not make him cautious or prudent. When our Lord 
was taken prisoner, the Evangelist expressly tells us that 
Peter followed Him. Followed Him ? Indeed, he followed 
Him ; but he followed Him afar off. He waited on the out- 
skirts of the crowd. He tried to hide himself in the darkness 
of the night. He tried to conceal his features, lest any man 
might lay hold of him, and make him a prisoner, as the 
friend of the Redeemer. He began to be afraid of the dan 
ger of acknowledging himself to be the servant of such a mas« 



74 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ter. He began to think of himself, when every thought of his 
mind, and every energy of his heart, should have been con- 
centrated upon his Lord. He followed Him ; but at some dis- 
tance. Ah ! at a good distance ! John, on the other hand, 
rushed to the front. John wanted to be seen with his Mas- 
ter. John wanted to take the Master's hand — even when 
bound by the thongs, that he might receive the vivifying 
touch of contact with Christ ! John wanted to hear every 
word that might be said, whether it were for or against Him. 
John wanted to feast his eyes upon every object which 
engaged the attention of his Lord, and by whose look it was 
irradiated — a type, indeed, of a class of Christian men seek- 
ing the society and the presence of the Master, and strength- 
ened by that seeking and that presence. He is the type of 
the man who goes frequently to Holy Communion, preparing 
himself by a good confession, and so laying the basis of a 
sacramental union with God, that becomes a large element 
of his life ; — the man who goes to the altar every month ; — 
the man who is familiar with Christ, and who enters some- 
what into the inner chambers of that sacred heart of Infinite 
Love ; — the man who knows what those few minutes of rap- 
ture are which are reserved for the pure, — for those who not 
only endeavor to serve God, but to serve Him lovingly and 
well. Those are the men who walk in the footsteps of John ; 
those are his representatives. Peter is represented by the 
man who goes to holy Communion once or twice in the year 
— going, perhaps, once at Easter or Christmas, and then 
returning to the world and the flesh again. God grant that 
neither the world, nor the flesh, nor the devil will take pos- 
session of the days, or weeks, or years of the rest of his life ! 
— he who gives, — twice in the year, perhaps, — an hour or 
two to earnest communion with God, and for all the rest only 
a passing consideration, flashing momentarily across the cur- 
rent of his life. And what was the consequence ? John 
went up to Calvary, and took the proudest place that ever 
was given to man. Peter met, in the outer hall, a little ser- 
vant-maid, and she said to him " Whom seekest thou ? — 
Jesus of Nazareth ?" The moment that the child's voice fell 
upon his ear, he denied his Master, and he swore an oath 
that he did not know Him. 

Now, we come to the third grand attribute of John ; and 
it is to this, my friends, that I would call your attention 
especially. Tender as the love of this man was for his Mas- 
ter — his friend — mark how strong and how manly it was at 
the same time. He does not stand aside. He will allow no 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



soldier, or guard, or executioner, to thrust him aside or put 
liira away from his Master. He stands by that Masters side, 
when He stood before His accusers in the Prsetorium of Pilate. 
He comes out. John receives Him into his arms, when, 
fainting with loss of blood, He returns, surrounded by sol- 
diers, from the terrific scene of His scourging; and, when 
the Cross is laid upon the shoulders of the Redeemer, — with 
the crowd of citizens around him — at His right hand, so close 
that he might lean upon Him — if he could, is the manly form 
of St. John the Evangelist. Oh, think of the love that was 
in his heart, and the depth of his sorrow, when he saw his 
Lord, his Master, his Friend, his only love, reduced to so 
terrible a state of woe, of misery, and of weakness ! This 
was the condition of our Divine Lord, when they laid the 
heavy cross upon His shoulder. How the Apostle of Love 
would have taken that painful and terrible crown, with its 
thorns, from off the brows to which they adhered, and set the 
thorns upon his own head, if they had only been satisfied to 
let him bear the pains and sufferings of his Master and his 
God ! Oh, how anxious must he have been to take the load 
that was placed upon the unwilling shoulders of Simon of 
Gyrene ! Oh, how he must have envied the man who lifted 
the cross from off the bleeding shoulders of the Divine Vic- 
tim, and set it on his own strong shoulders, and bore it along 
up the steep side of Calvary ! How grateful was John to 
the wicked executioner, when, lifting up his face to gaze, he 
met the sympathy and sorrow, and consolation of the Lord ! 
With what gratitude must the Apostle have looked upon the 
face of Veronica, who, with eyes streaming with tears, and on 
bended knees, upheld the cloth on which the Saviour im- 
printed the marks of His divine countenance ! Yet, who 
was this man? — who was this man who received the blow as 
the criminal who was about to be executed *? Who is this 
man who takes the place of shame ? VTho is this man who 
is willing to assume all the opprobrium and all the penalty 
that follows upon it? He is the only one of the Twelve 
Apostles that is known. "We read in the gospels that the 
Apostles were all mere men, — poor men, taken out of the 
crowd by our Lord. The only one among them who had 
made some mark, who was noted, who was remembered for 
something or another, was St. John. And by whom was he 
known ? He was known, says the Evangelist — he was known 
to the high priests. He was so well known to them, and 
to their guards and to their officers, and to their fellow- 
priests, that when our Lord was in the house of Annas, John 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



entered as a matter of course ; and when Peter, with the rest, 
was shut out, all that John had to do was to speak a word 
to the officers — "because," says the Evangelist, " he was 
well-known to the high priests" — well-known to the chief 
magistrates — well-known to the men in power — well-known 
to the chief senators. " Oh, John ! John ! be prudent ! You 
may be evidence against your fellows ! Remember that you 
are a noted man, so that you will be set down by the men in 
power, for shame perhaps, or indignity, or even death : if 
you are seen with those who, perhaps, will be sent, it will be 
verified against you ! Let Peter go : no one knows him. Let 
Peter go, or some one whom no one knows. Let John 
remain ; — some one on whom Mary can lean ; — some one in 
whose beautiful countenance she can look with trust : — some 
one to lean on, and to love her. But consult your own inter- 
ests. Don't be rash. There is no knowing when we may 
want your aid or your authority." Oh, this is the language 
of the world. This is the language which we hear day after 
day. " Prudence and caution !" No necessity to parade our 
religion !" " No necessity to be thrusting our Catholicity be- 
fore the world !" " No necessity to be constantly unfurling 
the banner on which the Gross of Christ is depicted— the 
Cross on which He died to save the souls of men." " No ne- 
cessity for all this. Let us go peacefully with the world ! Let 
us worship hi secret. Let us go on Sunday to divine service 
quietly ; and let the world know nothing about this !" This 
is self-love. This is cowardice. Oh, how noble the answer of 
him whom all the world knew ! How noble the soul of him 
who stood by Him, when he knew he was a noted man, and 
that, sooner or later, his fidelity on that Good Friday morn- 
ing would bring him into trouble ! Ah, how glorious the 
action of the man who knew he was compromising himself ! — 
that he was placing his character, his liberty, his very life in 
jeopardy ! — that he was suffering perhaps in the tender- 
est intimacy and friendship ! — that he was losing him- 
self perhaps in the esteem of those worldly men who thought 
they were doing a wise, a proper, and a prudent thi ng when 
they sent the Lord to be crucified. He stands by his order. 
He says, in the face of this whole world, " Whoever is His 
enemy, I am His friend. 'Whatever is His position to-day I 
am His creature: and I recognize Him as my God !" And so 
he trod, step by step, with the fainting Redeemer, up the rug- 
ged sides of Calvary. We know not what words of love and 
of strong manly sympathy he may have poured into the 
afiiicted ears. We now not how much the drooping human- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



11 



ity of our Lord may have been strengthened and cheered in 
that sad hour by the presence of the faithful and loving John ! 
Have you ever been in great affliction, my friends? Has sor- 
row ever come upon you with a crushing and an overwhelm* 
ing weight ? Have you ever lacked heart and power in great 
difficulty, and seen no escape from the crushing weight of 
anxiety that was breaking your heart ? Do you not remem- 
ber that such has been the daily experience of your life ? Do 
you not know what it is to have even one friend — one friend on 
whom you can rely with perfect and implicit confidence — one 
friend who you know, believes in you and loves you, and 
whose love is as strong as his life ? — one friend who, you 
know, will uphold you even though the whole world be 
against you ? Such was the comfort, such the consolation 
that it was the Evangelist's privilege to pay to our Lord on 
Calvary. No human prudence of argument dissuaded him. 
He thought it, — and he thought rightly, — the supreme of wis- 
dom to defy, to despise and to trample upon the world, when 
that world was crucifying his Lord and Master, highest type 
of the man, saying from out the depths of his own conscience 
" I am above the world !" Let every man ask himself this 
night, and answer the question to his own soul: "Do I imi- 
tate the purity, do I imitate the love, do I imitate the courage 
or the bravery of this man, of whom it is said that he was 
€ the disciple whom Jesus loved ?' " He got this reward exceed- 
ing great. Ah, how little did he know — great as his love was 
— how little did he know the gift that was in store for him——, 
and that should be given him through the blood that flowed 
from that dying head ! Little did he know of the crowning 
glory that was reserved to him at the foot of the Cross ! 
How his heart must have throbbed with the liveliest emo- 
tions of delight, mingled in a stormy confusion with the great- 
ness of his sorrow, when, from the lips of his dying Master, he 
discovered the command : " Behold thy Mother! " — and with 
eyes dimmed with the tears of anguish and of love, did he cast 
his most pure, most loving, and most reverential glance upon 
the forlorn Mother of the dying Son ! What was his ecstacy 
when he heard the voice of the dying Master say to Mary : 
" Oh, mother, look to John, my brother, my lover, my friend ! 
Take him for thy son !" To John he says : " Son, I am 
going away. I am leaving this woman the most desolate of 
all creatures that ever walked the earth. True, she is to mo 
the dearest object in Heaven or on earth. Friend, I have 
nothing that I love so much ! Friend, there is no one for 
Whom I have so much love as I have for her ! And to you 



78 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

do I leave her ! Take her as your mother, Oh, dearly 
beloved ! " John advanced one step — the type and the 
prototype of the new man redeemed by our Lord — the type 
whose glory it was to be — that he was to be Mary's Son ! 
He advanced a step, until he comes right in front of his 
dying and blessed Lord. John advances one step : — the 
type — the prototype of the new man, redeemed by the 
Saviour, — and whose glory it was henceforth to be that he 
was to be "Mary's Son. He advances a step until he comes 
right in front of his dying Lord, and he approaches Mary 
the Mother, in the midst of her sorrow, and flings himself 
into her loving arms. And the newly-found son embraces his 
heavenly mother, while from the crucified Lord the drops of 
blood fall down upon them and cement the union between 
our human nature and His, and fulfill the promise He had 
made to His Heavenly Father in the adoption of our 
humanity. 

The scene at Calvary I will not touch upon, or describe. 
The slowly passing minutes of pain, of anguish and of agony 
that stretched out these three terrible hours of incessant suf 
fering ; — of these I will not speak. In your estimation and 
in mine they do not need to be spoken of. But, when the 
scene was over ; — when the Lord of Glory and of Love sent 
forth His last cry ; — when the terrified heart of the Virgin 
throbbed with alarm as she saw the centurion draw back his 
terrible lance and thrust it through the side of our Divine 
Lord ; — when all this was over and when our Lord was taken 
down from the Cross and his body placed in Mary's arms ;— 
after she had washed away the stains with her tears, and 
purified His face ; — after she had taken off the crown of 
thorns from His brow, and when they had laid Him in the 
tomb — the desolate mother put her hands into those of her 
newly-found child, St. John, and with him returned to Jeru- 
salem. The glorious title of " The Child of Mary " was now 
his ; and with this precious gift of the dying Redeemer he 
rejoiced in Mary's society and in Mary's care. The Virgin 
was then, according to tradition, in her forty-ninth year. 
During the twelve years that she survived with John, she 
was mostly in Jerusalem, while he preached in Ephesus, one 
of the cities of Asia Minor, and founded there a church, and 
held the chair as its first Apostle and Bishop. Lie founded a 
church at Phillipi, and a church at Thessalonica, and many 
of the churches in Asia Minor. His whole life, for seventy 
years after the death of his divine Lord, was spent in the 
propagation of the Gospel and in the establishing of the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Church. But for twelve years more the Virgin Mother was 
with him, in his house, tenderly surrounding him with every 
comfort that her care could supply. Oh, think of the rap- 
tures of this household that we read of so much ! Every 
glance of her virginal eyes upon him reminded her of Him 
who was gone, — for John was like his Divine Master. 
It was that wonderful resemblance to Christ which the high- 
est form of grace brings out in the soul. Picture to your- 
selves, if you can, that life at Ephesus, when the Apostle, 
worn down by his apostolic preaching, fatigued and wearied 
from his constantly proclaiming the victory and the love of 
the Redeemer, returned to the house and sat down, while 
Mary, with her tender hand wiped the sweat from his brow, 
and these two, sitting together, spoke of the Lord and of the 
mysteries of the life in Nazareth ; and from Mary's lips he 
heard of the mysteries of the thirty years of love in the hum- 
ble house of Nazareth, and of how Joseph had died, she hold- 
ing his head, and the Son of God standing by his side. From 
Mary's lips he heard the secrets — the mournful secrets of her 
Divine Son ; — until, filled with inspiration, and rising to the 
highest and most glorious heights of divinely inspired 
thought, he proclaimed the Gospel that begins with the won- 
derful words, " In the beginning was the Word," denoting 
and pointing back to the eternity of the Son of God. Pic- 
ture to yourselves, if you can, how Mary poured out to John, 
years after the death of our Lord, her words of gratitude for 
the care with which he surrounded her, and of all her grati- 
tude to him for all that he had done in consoling and uphold- 
ing her Divine Child in the hour of His Sorrow ! Oh this 
surpasses all contemplation. Next to that mystery of Divine 
Love, the life in Nazareth with her own Child, comes near- 
est the life she lives in Ephesus with her second, her adopted 
son, St. John the Evangelist. He passed to Heaven, first 
among the virgins, says St. Peter Damen, — first in glory as 
first in love, enshrined to-day in the brightest light that sur- 
sounds the virgin choirs of Eleaven ! Now, now he sings tne 
songs of angelic joy and angelic love ; — and he leaves to you 
and to me, — as he stands, and as we contemplate him upon 
the Hill of Calvary, — the grand and the instructive lesson of 
how the Christian man is to behave towards his Lord and his 
God ; living in Christian unity, — in the Christ-given strength 
of divine love — and in that glorious world-despising assertion 
of the divinity of the love of Jesus Christ for his Church and 
His holy religion, — which, trampling under foot all mere 
human respect, lives and glories in the friendship of God, and 



80 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



in the possession of His holy faith and the practice of His 
holy religion, — not blushing for Him before man ; and thus 
gaining the reward of Him who says : " And he that con- 
fesses me before men, the same will I confess before My 
Father in Heaven." 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[Good Friday Sermon of Rev. Father Burke, delivered in the 
Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrers, in Lexington Avenue and 
Sixty-Sixth Street, New York.] 



"CHRIST ON CALVARY." 



" All you that pass this way, come and see, if there be any sorrow 
like unto my sorrow." 

Dearly Beloved Brethren — These words are found 
in the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. There is a 
festival ordained by the Almighty God, for the tenth day 
of the seventh month of the Jewish year; and this festival 
was called the " Day of Atonement." Now, among the Com- 
mandments that the Almighty God gave concerning the 
" Day of Atonement," there was this remarkable one : 
"Every soul," said the Lord, "that shall not be afflicted on 
that day, shall perish from out the land." The command- 
ment that He gave them was a commandment of sorrow, 
because it was the day of the atonement. The day of the 
Christian atonement is come, — the day of the mighty sacri- 
fice by which the world was redeemed. And if, at other 
seasons we are told to rejoice, — in the words of the Scrip- 
ture — " rejoice in the Lord ; I say to you again, rejoice," — 
to-day, with our holy mother, the Church, we must put off 
the garments of joy, and clothe ourselves in the garments of 
sorrow. If, at other times, we are told to be glad in the 
Lord, — according to the words of Scripture, "rejoice in the 
Lord and be glad," — to-day the command is that every soul 
shall be afflicted ; and the soul that is not afflicted sliall 
perish. And, now, before we enter upon the consideration 
of the terrible sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ, — all that 
He endured for our salvation, — it is necessary, my dearly 
beloved brethren, that we should turn our thoughts to tho 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



81 



Victim, whom we contemplate this night dying for our sins. 
That Victim was our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Son 
of God. When the Almighty God, after the first two thou- 
sand years of the world's history, resolved to destroy the 
whole race of mankind, on account of their sins, He flooded 
the earth ; and, in that universal ruin, He wiped out the sin 
by destroying the sinners. Now, in that early hour of God's 
first terrible visitation, the water that overwhelmed the whole 
world, and destroyed all mankind, came from three sources. 
First of all, we are told, that God, with His own hand, drew 
back the bolts of Heaven, and rained down water from 
Heaven upon the earth. Secondly, w e are told that all the 
secret springs and fountains that were in the bosom of the 
earth itself, burst and came forth, — " the fountains of the 
great abyss burst forth," says Holy Writ. Thirdly, we are 
told, that the great ocean itself overflowed its shores and its 
banks ; and the sea uprose, until the waters covered the 
mountain tops. Thus, dearly beloved brethren, in this 
inundation, this flood of suffering and sorrow that came 
upon the Son of God, made man, we find that His blood burst 
forth from three distinct sources. First of all, from Heaven, 
the Eternal Father sending down the merciless hand of jus- 
tice, to strike His own Divine Son. Secondly, from Christ 
our Lord Himself. As from the hidden fountains of the 
earth, sending forth their springs, so from amid the very 
heart and soul of Jesus Christ, — from the very nature 
of His being, — do we gather the greatness of His suf- 
fering. Thirdly, from the sea rising, — that is to say, from 
the malice and wickedness of man. Behold, then, the three 
several sources of all the sufferings that we are about to con- 
template. A just and angry God in Heaven; a most pure 
and holy and loving Man-God upon earth, having to endure 
all that hell could produce of most wicked and most demon- 
iac rage against Him. God's justice rose up, — for, remember, 
God was angry on this Good Friday, — the Eternal Father 
rose up in heaven, in all His power, — He rose up in all His 
justice. Before Him was a Victim for all the sins that ever 
had been committed ; before Him was the Victim of a fallen 
race, that were never, never to see Him, so long as they 
remained upon this earth ; before Him, in the very person of 
Jesus Christ Himself, were represented the accumulated sins 
of all the race of mankind. Hitherto, we read in the Gospel, 
that, when the Father from heaven looked down upon His 
own Divine Child upon the earth, He was accustomed to send 
forth His voice in such language as this — " This is my 



82 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Hitherto, no sin, 
no deformity, no vileness was there but the beauty of Heaven 
itself in that fairest form of human body, — in that beautiful 
soul, and in the fullness of the divinity that dwelt in Jesus 
Christ. Well might the Father exclaim — "This is my 
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ! " But, to-day, — ■ 
oh, to-day !— the sight of the beloved Son excites no pleasure 
in the Father's eyes, — brings forth no word of consolation or 
of love from the Father's lips. And why ? Because the 
all-holy and all beloved Son of God, on this Good Friday 
took upon Him the garment of our sins, — of all that His 
Father detested upon this earth ; all that ever raised the 
quick anger of the Eternal God ; all that ever made Him put 
forth His arm ; strong in judgment and in vengeance ; — all this 
is concentrated upon the sacred person of Him who became 
the victim for the sins of men. How fair He seems to us, 
when we look up to that beautiful figure of Jesus, — how fair 
He seemed to His Virgin Mother, even when no beauty or 
comeliness was left in Him ; — how fair He seemed to the Mag- 
dalen, again, who saw Him robed in His own crimson blood. 
The Father in Heaven saw no beauty, no fairness, in His 
Divine Son in that hour ; He only saw in Him and on Him, 
all the sins of mankind, which He took upon Himself that He 
might become for us a Saviour, Picture to yourselves there- 
fore first, this mighty fountain of divine wrath that was poured 
out upon the Lord. It was the Father's hand — the hand of 
the Father's justice, — outstretched to assert His rights, to 
restore to Himself the honor and the glory of which the sins 
of all men, in all ages, in all climes had deprived Him. Pic- 
ture to yourselves that terrible hand of God drawing back 
the bolts of Heaven, and letting out on His own divine Son, 
the fury of this wrath that was pent up for four thousand 
years ! We stand stricken with fear in the contemplation of 
the anger of God, in the first great punishment of sin, the Uni- 
versal Deluge. And all the sins that in every age roused the 
Father's anger were actually visible to the Father's eyes on 
the person of His Divine Son. We stand astonished and 
frightened when we see with the eyes of faith and of revela- 
tion, the living fire descending from Heaven upon Sodom and 
Gomorrha, — the balls of fire floating in the air, thick as the 
descending flakes in the snow-storm; — the hissing of the 
flames as they came rushing down from Heaven like the hail 
that comes down in the hail-storm ; the roaring of these 
flames as they filled the atmosphere : — the terrible, lurid light 
of them ; — the shrieks of the people, who are being burned up 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



83 



alive ; — the lowing of the tortured beasts in the fields ; — the 
birds of the air falling, and sending forth their plaintive 
voices, as they fall to earth, their plumage scorched and 
burned. All the sins that Almighty God, in heaven, saw in 
that hour of His wrath, when he rained down fire, — all these 
did He see, on this Good Friday morning, upon His own 
divine and adorable Sod. All the sins that ever man com- 
mitted were upon Him ; in the hour of His humilation and of 
His agony, because He was truly man ; because He was a 
voluntary victim for our sins ; because He stepped in between 
our nature, that was to be destroyed, and the avenging hand 
of the Father lifted for our destruction ; and these sins upon 
Him became an argument to make the Almighty God in 
Heaven forget, in that hour, every attribute of His mercy, and 
put forth against His son all the omnipotence of His justice. 
Consider it well ; let it enter into your minds, — the strokes 
of the Divine vengeance that would have ruined you and me, 
and sunk us into hell for all eternity were ranied by the un- 
sparing hand of Omnipotence, in that hour, upon our Lord 
Jesus Christ. 

The second fountain and source from which came forth the 
deluge of His sorrow and His suffering was His own divine 
heart, and His own immaculate nature. For remember He 
was as truly man as He was God. From the moment Mary 
received the Eternal Word into her womb from that moment 
Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, was as truly 
man as He was God ; and in that hour of His Incarnation, a 
human body and a human soul were created for Him. Now, 
first of all, that human soul that he took was the purest and 
most perfect that God could make, — perfect in every natural 
perfection, — in the quickness and comprehensiveness of its 
intelligence, — in the large capacity for love in its human 
heart — in the great depth of its generosity and exalted human 
spirit. Nay more the very body in which that blessed soul 
was enshrined was so formed that it was the most perfect 
body that was ever given to man. Now, the perfection of 
the body in man lies in a delicate organization, — in the ex- 
treme delicacy of fibre, muscle and nerve; because they 
make it a fitting instrument in order that the soul within 
may inpirt it. The more perfect, therefore, the human being 
is, the more sensitive is he to shame, the more deeply does he 
feel degradation, the more quickly do dishonor and humilia- 
tion, like a two-edged sword, pierce the spirit. Nay, the 
more sensitive he is to pain, the more does he shrink away 
naturally from that which causes pain; and that which would 



84 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



"be pain to a grosser organization is actual agony, is actual 
torment to the perfect man, formed with such a soul that at 
the very touch of his body the sensitive soul is made cogniz- 
ant of pleasure and of pain, of joy and of sorrow. What 
follows this ? St. Bonaventure, in his " Life of Christ," tells 
us that so delicate was the sacred and most perfect body of 
Our Lord that even the palm of His head or the sole of His 
foot, was more sensitive than the inner pupil of the eye of any 
ordinary man; that even the least touch caused him pain; 
that every rude air that visited that Divine face brought to 
Him a sense of exquisite pain that ordinary men could 
scarcely experience. Add to this that, in Him was the ful- 
ness of the God-head realizing all that was beautiful on 
earth; realizing with infinite capacity the enormity of sin; 
realizing every evil that ever fell upon nature in making it 
accessible to sin; and above all, taking in, to the full extent 
of its eternal duration, the curse, the reprobation, and dam- 
nation that falls upon the wicked, — oh, how many sources of 
sorrow are here ? Here is the heart of the man — Jesus Christ: 
— here is the fullness of the infinite sanctity of God, — here, 
the infinite horror that God has for sin. For this man is God ! 
Here, therefore is at once, the indignation, the infinite repug- 
nance, the actual sense of horror and detestation which, 
amounting to an infinite, passionate repugnance, absorbed the 
whole nature of Jesus Christ in one act of violence against 
that which is come upon Him. Now, every single sin com- 
mitted in this world comes and actually effects, as it were, its 
lodgment in the soul and spirit of Jesus. At other times He 
may rest, as He did rest, in the Virgin's arms, — for she was 
sinless; at other times He may allow sin and the sinner to 
come to His feet and touch Him; but by that very touch, she 
was made as pure as an angel of God. But, to-day this infin- 
itely holy heart, — this infinitely tender heart must open itself 
to receive — no longer simply to purify, but to assume and 
atone for all the sins of the world. 

The third great source of His suffering was the rage 
and the malice of men. They tore that sacred body; they 
forgot every instinct of humanity ; they forgot every dictate, 
every ordinance of the old law to lend to thei: outrages all 
the fury of hell, when they fell upon him, as the Scripture 
says, " Like hungry dogs of chase upon their prey." He is 
now approaching the last sad day of His existence ; He is 
now about to close His life in sufferings which 1 shall en- 
deavor to put before you. But, remember, that this Good 
Friday, with all its terrors, is but the end of a life of thirty- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



85 



three years of agony and of suffering ! From the moment 
when the Word was made flesh in Mary's womb, — from the 
moment when the Eternal God became man,— even before He 
was born, — the cross, the thorny crown, and all the horrors 
that were accomplished on Calvary were steadily before the 
eyes of Jesus. The infant in Bethlehem saw them ; the 
Child in Nazareth saw them; the Young Man, toiling to 
support his mother, saw them ; the Preacher on the moun- 
tain side beheld them. Never, for a single instant, were the 
horrors that were fulfilled on Good Friday morning absent 
from the mind or the contemplation of Jesus Christ. Oh, 
dearly beloved brethren, well did the Psalmist say of Him, 
"My grief and my sorrow is always before me;" well the 
Psalmist said, "I have, during my whole life, walked in 
sorrow ! I was scourged the whole day ! " That day was 
the thirty-three years of His mortal life. Picture to your- 
selves what that life of grief must have been. There was 
the Almighty God in the midst of men, hearing their blas- 
phemies, beholding their infamous actions, fixing His all-pure 
and all-holy eyes on their licentiousness, their ambition, their 
avarice, their dishonesty, their impurity. And so the very 
presence of those He came to redeem was a constant source 
of grief to Jesus Christ. Moreover, He knew well that He 
came into the world to suffer, and only to suffer. Every 
other being created into this world was created for some joy 
or other. There is not, even in hell, a creature whom 
Almighty God intended, in creating, for a life and eternity 
of misery ; if they are there, they are there by their own 
act, not by the act of God. Not so with Christ. His sacred 
body was formed for the express and sole purpose that it 
might be the victim for the sins of man, and the sacrifice for 
the world's redemption. " Sacrifice and oblation," He said, 
"Thou wouldst not, O God ; but Thou hast prepared a body 
for me." " Coming into the world," says St. Paul, " He 
proclaimed, 'for this I am come, that I may do Thy will, O 
Father.'" The father's will was that He should suffer ; and 
for this was He created. Therefore, as he was made for 
suffering, — as that body was given to Him for no purpose of 
joy, but only of suffering, expiation, and of sorrow, — there- 
fore it was that God made Him capable of a sorrow equal to 
the remission He was about to grant. That was infinite 
sorrow. 

And now, deaily beloved, having considered these things, 
*ve come to contemplate that which was always before the 
mind of Christ — that from which He knew there was no 



86 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



escape, — that which vras before Him really, not as the f ature 
is before us, when we, anticipate it and fear it, but it cornea 
indistinctly and confusedly before the mind. Not, so with 
Christ : every single detail of His passion, every sorrow that 
was to fall upon Him, every indignity that was to be put 
upon His body, — all, in the full clearness of their details, 
were before the eyes of the Lord Jesus Christ for the thirty- 
three years of his life. 

As the sun was sloping down towards the western horizon 
on the evening of the vigil of the Pasch, behold our Divine 
Lord with His Apostles around Him ; and there, seated in 
the midst of them He fulfilled the last precept of the law, in 
eating the Paschal lamb ; and, (as we saw last evening), He 
then changed the bread and wine into His own Body and 
Blood, and fed His Apostles with that of which the Paschal 
lamb was but a figure and a promise. Now they are about 
to separate in this world. Now, the greatest act of the char- 
ity of God has been performed. Now, the Lord Jesus Christ 
is living and palpitating in the heart of each and every one 
of these twelve. Now, — horror of horrors ! — He is gone into 
the heart of Judas ! Arising from the table our Lord took 
with him Peter, and James, and John, and He turned calmly, 
and deliberately to enter the red sea of His Passion, and to 
wade through His own blood, until He landed upon the oppo- 
site shore of pardon and mercy, and grace, and brought with 
Him, in His own sacred humanity, the whole human race. 
Calmly, deliberately, taking his three friends with Him, He 
went out from the sapper-hall, as the shades of evening were 
deepening into night, and He walked outside the walls of 
J erusalem, where there was a garden full of olive trees, that 
was called Gethsemane. The Lord Jesus was accustomed to 
go there to pray. Many an evening had He knelt within 
those groves ; many a night had He spent under the shade 
of these trees, filling the silent place with the voice of His 
cries and sobbings, before the Lord, His Father, to obtain 
pardon and mercy for mankind. Now, He goes there for the 
last time ; and as He is approaching — as soon as ever He 
catches sight of the garden, — as soon as the familiar olives 
present themselves to His eyes, He sees — what Peter, and 
James, and John did not see, — He sees there, in that dark 
garden, the mighty array — the mighty, tremendous array 
of all the sins that were ever committed in this world— 
as if they had taken the bodily form of demons of hell. 
There they were now — waiting silently, fearfully, with eyes 
glaring with infernal rage ! And he saw them. And among 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



87 



them was He, the Lord God, to go ? Among them must He 
go ? No wonder that the moment He caught sight of that 
garden He started back, and turning to the three Apostles, He 
said : " Stand by Me now, for My soul is sorrowful unto 
death." And, leaning upon the virgin bosom of John, who 
wa<* astonished at this divine trial of his Master, He mur- 
mured unto him, " John, my soul is sorrowful unto death ! 
Stand by me," He says, " and watch with Me — and pray ! " 
The man ! — the man proving His humanity ! proving His 
humanity which belonged to Him as truly as His divinity ! 
The man, turning to, and clinging to his friends, — gathering 
them around Him at that terrible moment when he was about 
to face His enemies. He cries again and again, — " Stand by 
me ! stand by me ! and support me, and watch, and pray with 
me ! " And then, leaving them, alone He enters the gloomy 
place. Summoning all the courage of God, — summoning to His 
aid all the infinite resources of His love, — summoning the great 
thought that if He was about to be destroyed, mankind was 
to be saved, He dashes fearlessly into the depths of Gethse- 
mane ; and when He was as far from His Apostles as a man 
could throw a stone — there, in the dark depths of the forest, 
the Lord Jesus knelt down and prayed. What was His 
prayer ? Oh, that army of sins was closing around him ! Oh, 
the breath of Hell was on His face ! There did he see the 
busy demons marshalling their forces — drawing closer and 
closer to Him all the iniquities of men. " Oh, Father ! " He 
cries — "Oh, Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass 
away from me !" But He immediately added — " ISTot My will 
but Thine be done ? " then turning — for the Father's will was 
indicated to Him in the voice from Heaven, with the first tone 
of anger upon it, the first word of anger that Jesus ever 
heard from His Father's lips, saying : " It is my will to strike 
Thee ! Go ! " He turned; He bared His innocent bosom ; He 
put out His sinless hands, and, turning to all the powers of 
Hell allowed the ocean wave of sin to flow in upon Him and 
overwhelm Him. The lusts and wickedness of men before 
the Flood, the impurities of Sodom and Gomorrha, the 
idolatries of the nations, the ingratitude of Israel ; — all the 
sins that ever appeared under the eyes of God's anger — all 
— all ! — like the waves of the ocean, coining in and falling 
upon a solitary man, who kneels alone on the shore — all fell 
upon Jesus Christ. He looks upon Himself, and He scarcely 
recognizes Himself now. Are these the hands of Jesus 
Christ scarcely daiing to uplift themselves in prayer, for 
they are red with ten thousand deeds of blood ? Is this the 



88 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



heart of Jesus, frozen up with unbelief, as if He felt what 
He could not feel — that He was the personal enemy of God ? 
Is this the sacred soul of Jesus Christ, darkened for the 
moment with the errors and the adulteries of the whole 
world? In the halls of His memory nothing but the 
hideous figures of sin ! — desolation, broken hearts, weep- 
ing eyes, cries of despair, dire blasphemies ; — these are the 
things He sees within Himself ; that He hears in His 
ears ! It is a world of sin around Him. It is a raging of 
demons about Him. It is as if sin entered into His blood. 
Oh, God ! He bears it as long as a suffering man can bear. 
But at length, from out the depths of His most sacred heart 
— from out the very divinity that was in Him, — the foun- 
tains of the great deep were moved, and forth came a rush 
of blood from every pore. His eyes can no longer dwell on 
the terrible vision. He can no longer look upon these red 
scenes of blood and impurity. A weakness comes mercifully 
to His relief. He gazes upon the fate that God has put upon 
Him ; and then He falls to the earth, writhing in His agony ; 
and forth from every pore of His sacred frame streams the 
blood ! Behold Him ! Behold, the blood as it oozes out 
through His garments, making them red as those of a man 
who has trodden in the wine press ! Behold Him as His 
agonizing face lies prone upon the earth. Behold Him as, in 
the hour of that terrible agony, His blood reddens the soil 
of Gethsemane ! — behold Him as he writhes on the ground,— 
one mass of streaming blood — sweating blood from head to 
foot, — crying out in His agony for the sins of the whole 
world ! A mountain of the anger of God is upon Him. 
Behold Him in Gethsemane, O Christian man ! Kneel down 
by His side ! Lie down on that blood-stained earth, and, for 
the love of Jesus Christ, whisper one word of consolation to 
Him ! For, remember that you and I were there, — were there, 
and He saw us, — even as He sees us in this hour, gathered 
under the roof of this church. Oh, did He see us in our qual- 
ity of sinners, as with every sin that ever we committed — as 
if, with a stone in our uplifted hand, we flung it down upon 
His defenceless form ? When Acan was convicted of a crime, 
Joshua gave word that every man of the Jewish nation 
should take a stone in his hand, and fling it at him ; and all 
the people of Israel came and flung them upon him, and put 
him to death. So every son of man, from Adam down to the 
last that was born on this earth, — every son of man — every 
human being that breathed the breath of God's creation in 
this world, was there, in that hour, to fling his sins, and let 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



89 



them fall clo^n upon Jesus Christ. All, all, — save one. 
There was one whose hand was not lifted against Him. 
There was one who, if she had been there, could be only- 
there to help Him and to console Him. But no help ! no 
consolation in that hour ! Therefore, Mary, the only sinless 
one, was absent. He rises after an hour. No scourge has been 
yet laid upon that sacred body. No executioner's hand 
has profaned Him as yet. No nail had been driven through 
His hands. And yet the blood covered His body — for 
His Passion began from that source to which I have 
alluded — His own divine spirit : His Passion — His pain 
began from within. He rises from the earth. What is 
this which we hear ? There is a sound, as of the voices of 
a rabble. There are hoarse voices filling the night. There 
are men with clubs in their hands, and lanterns lighted. 
They come with fire and fury in their eyes, and the universal 
voice is, "Where is He? Where is He ?" Ah there is one 
at the head of them ! You hear his voice. " Come cau- 
tiously ! I see Him. I will point Him out to you ! There are 
four of them. There He is with three of His friends. When 
you see me take a man in my arms and kiss him, He is the 
man ! Lay hold of Him at once, and drag Him away with 
you — and do what you please? Who is he that says this? 
Who are they that come like hell-hounds, thirsting for the 
blood of Jesus Christ ? that come with the rage of hell in their 
blood, and in their mouths ? They are come to take Him 
and to tear Him to pieces ! Who is this that leads them on ? 
Oh, friends and men ! it is Judas, the Apostle ! Judas, who 
spent three years in the society of Jesus Christ ! Judas, that 
was taught by Him every lesson of piety and virtue, by word 
and by example. Judas, who received the priesthood. Ju- 
das, upon whose lips, even now, blushes the sacred blood 
received in Holy communion ! Oh, it is Judas ! And he has 
come to give up his Master, whom he has sold for thirty- 
pieces of silver. He went after his unworthy communion, to 
the Pharisees, and he said : " What will you give me and I 
will sell Him to you ? — give Him up ?" He put no price 
upon Jesus. He thought so little of his Master that he was 
prepared to take anything they would offer. They offered 
him thirty small pieces of silver ; and he clutched at the 
money. He thought it was a great deal, and more than Jesus 
Christ was worth ! Now he comes to fulfil his portion of the 
contract ; and he points the Lord out by going up to him — 
putting his traitor lips upon the face of Jesus Christ, and seal- 
ing upon that face the kiss of a false-hearted, a wicked and a 



DO 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



traitorous follower. Behold him now. The Son of God sees 
him approach. He opens his arms to him. Judas flings him- 
self in his Master's arms, and he hears the gentle reproach, — 
oh, last proof of love ! — oh, last opportunity to him to 
repent — even in this hour ! — "Judas, is it with a kiss thou 
bet ray est the Son of Man ! " 

Now, the multitude rushes in upon Him and seizes Ilim. 
We have a supplement to the Gospel narrative in the revela- 
tions of many of the Saints and of holy souls who in reward 
for their extraordinary devotion to the Passion of our Lord 
were favored with a closer sight of His sufferings. Now we 
are told by one of these whose revelations though not yet 
approved are tolerated by the Church, that when our Divine 
Lord gave Himself into the hands of His enemies, they bound 
Llis sacred arms with a rope and rushed towards the city, 
dragging along with them, forcibly and violently, the exhaus- 
ted Redeemer. Exhausted, I say, for His soul had just passed 
through the agony of His prayer, and His body was still drip- 
ping with the sweat of blood. Between that spot and Jerusa- 
lem flowed the little stream called the Brook of Kedron. 
When they came to that little stream our Saviour stumbled 
and fell over a stone. They, without waiting to give Him 
time to rise, pulled and dragged Him on with all their might. 
They literally dragged Him through the water, wounding and 
bruising His body by contact with the rocks that were in its 
bed. It was night when they brought Him into Jerusalem, 
that night a cohort of Roman soldiers formed the body-guard of 
Pilate. They were called archers: men of the most corrupt 
and terrible vices; men without faith in God or man: men 
whose every word was either a blasphemy, or an impurity. 
These men, who were only anxious for amusement, when they 
found the prisoner dragged into Jerusalem at that hour, took 
possession of Him for the night and they brought Him to their 
quarters: and there the Redeemer was put sitting in the 
midst of them. During the whole of that long night 
between Holy Thursday and Good Friday morning the sol- 
diers remained sleepless, employed in loud revel in their deris- 
ion and torture of the Son of God. They struck Him on the 
head. They spat upon Him. They hustled Him with scorn 
from one to another. They bruised Him. They wounded 
Him in every conceivable form. Here, — silent as a lamb 
before the shearer, — was the Eternal Son of God, looking out 
with eyes of infinite knowledge and purity upon the very 
vilest men that all the iniquity of this earth could bring around 
Him. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



91 



He was brought before the High Priest. He was asked 
to answer. The moment the Son of God opened His lips to 
speak — the moment he attempted to testify — a brawny sol 
dier came out of the ranks, stepped before his Divine Lord, 
and saying to Him : " Answerest, thou, the High Priest 
thus ! " drew back his clenched mailed hand, with the full 
force of a strong man, flinging himself forward, and struck 
Almighty God in the face ! The Saviour reeled, stunned by 
the blow. The morning came. Now, He is led before Pilate, 
the Roman Governor, who, alone, has power to sentence Him 
to death, if He be guilty — and who has the obligation to 
protect Him and set Him at liberty if He be innocent. The 
Scribes and the Pharisees and the Publicans were there, — the 
leaders of the people and the rabble of Jerusalem was with 
them — and in the midst of them was the silent, innocent 
Victim who knew that the sad and terrible hour of His cruci- 
fixion was upon Him. Brought before Pilate, He is accused 
of this crime and that. Witnesses are called ; and the 
moment they come — the moment they look upon the face of 
God, — they are unable to give testimony against Him. They 
could say nothing that proved Him guilty of any crime ; 
and Pilate, enraged, turned to the Pharisees, turned to the 
learned men, turned to the people, themselves, and said : 
" What do you bring this man here for? Why is he bound? 
Why is he bruised and maltreated ? What has he done ? I 
find no crime, or shadow of a crime in him." He is not only 
innocent, but the judge declares, before all the people, that 
the man has done nothing whatever to deserve any punish- 
ment, much less death. How is this sentence received ? The 
Pharisees are busy among the people, whispering their cal- 
umnies, and prompting them to cry out, and say : " Crucify 
Him ! crucify Him ! We want to have Jesus of Nazareth cru- 
cified ! We want to do it early, because the evening will come 
and bring the Sabbath with it ! We want to have His blood 
shed ! Quick ! Quick ! Tell Pilate he must condemn Jesus 
of Nazareth, or else he is no friend to Caesar ! " The people 
cry out : "Let Him be crucified! If you let Him go, you 
are no friend of Caesar!" What says Pilate? "Crucify 
your King ! He calls himself i King of the Jews.' You, 
yourselves, wished to make Him your King, and you hon- 
ored Him. Am I to crucify Him whom you would have for 
King ? Am I to crucify your King ? " And then — then in 
an awful moment, Israel declared solemnly that God was no 
longer her King ; for the people cried out : " He is not our 
King ! We have no King but Caesar ! " We have no King 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



but Caesar ! The old cry of the man who, committing sin, 
says : " I have no King but my own passions ; I have no 
King but this world ; I have no King but the thoughts of 
money, or of honors, or of indulgence ! " So the Jews cried : 
" He is no King of ours ; we have no King but Ca?sar ! " 
Pilate, no doubt in a spirit of compromise, said to himself, 
" I see this man cannot escape. I see murder in these peoples' 
eyes! They are determined upon the crucifixion of this 
man, and, therefore, I must try to find out some way or 
another of appealing to their mercy." Then he thought to 
himself, " I will make an example of Him. I will tear the 
flesh off His bones. I will cover Him with blood. I will 
make Him such a pitiable object that not one in all that crowd 
will have the heart to demand further punishment, or another 
blow for Him." So, he called his officers, and said : " Take 
this man ; and scourge Him so as to make Him frightful to 
behold ; let Him be so mangled that when I show Him to 
the people they may be moved to pity and spare his life, for 
he is an innocent man." In the cold early morning, the 
Lord is led forth into the court-yard of the Praetorium, and 
there sixty of the strongest men of the guard are picked 
out, — chosen for their strength ; and they are told 
off into thirty pairs, and every man of the sixty has 
a new scourge in his hand. Some have chains of iron: 
some cords knotted, with steel spurs at the end of 
them ; others, the green, supple twig, plucked from the 
hedge in the early morning, — long and supple and ter- 
rible, armed with thorns. Now, these men come and close 
around our Lord. They strip Him of His garments ; they 
leave Him perfectly naked, blushing in his infinite modesty 
and purity, so that He longs for them to begin in order that 
they may robe Him in His blood. They tie His hands to a 
pillar ; they tie Him so that He cannot move, nor shrink from 
a blow, nor turn aside. And then the two first advance ; 
they raise their brawny arms in the air ; and then, with a 
hiss, down come the scourges upon the sacred body of the 
Lord ! Quicker again and quicker these arms rise in the air 
with these terrible scourges. Each stroke leaves its livid 
mark. The flesh rises into welts. The blood is congealed, 
and purple beneath the skin. Presently, the scourge comes 
down again, and it is followed by a quick spurt of blood 
from the sacred body of our Lord — the blows quickening, 
and without pause, and without mercy ; the blood flowing 
after every additional blow, — till these two strong men ark 
fatigued and tired out, — until their scourges are sodden ed 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



93 



and saturated, and dripping with His blood, do they still 
strike Him, — and then retire, exhausted, from their terrible 
labor ; — in comes another pair — fresh, vigorous, fresh arms 
and new men — come to rain blows upon the defenceless body 
of the Lord, upon His sacred limbs — upon His sacred shoul- 
ders. Every portion of His sacred body is torn : every blow 
brings the flesh from the bones, and opens a new wound and 
a new stream of blood. Now He stands ankle deep in His 
own blood, — hanging out from that pillar, exhausted, with 
head drooping, almost insensible. He is still beaten, — even 
when the very men who strike Him think, or suspect, that 
they may have killed Him. It was written in the Old Law, 
"If a man be found guilty," says the Lord in Deuteronomy, 
" let him be beaten, and let the measure of his sin be the 
measure of his punishment ; yet so that no criminal receive 
more than forty stripes, lest thy brother go away shamefully 
torn from before thy face ! " These were the words of the 
law. Well the Pharisees knew it ! Well the Publicans and 
Scribes knew it. And there they stood around in the outer 
circle, with hate in their eyes, fury upon their lips ; and even 
when the very men who were dealing out their revenge 
thought they had killed the victim they were scourging, still 
came forth from these hardened hearts the words of encour- 
agement : " Strike Him still ! Strike Him still ! " And there 
they continued their cruel task until sixty men retired, fatig- 
ued and worn out with the work of the scourging of our 
Lord. 

Now, behold Him as senseless He hangs from that pillar, 
one mass of bruised and torn flesh ! — one open wound, from 
the crown of His head to the soles of His feet ! — all bathed 
in the crimson of His own blood, and terrible to behold ! If 
you saw Him here, as He stood there ; if you saw Him now, 
standing upon that altar, — there is not a man or woman 
among you that could bear to look upon the terrible sight. 
They cut the cords that bound Him to the pillar : and the 
Redeemer fell down, bathed in His own blood, and senseless 
upon the ground. Behold Him again, as at Gcthsemane ; 
now, no longer the pain from within, but the pain from the 
terrible hand of man — the instrument of God's vengeance. 
Oh, behold Him ! Mary heard those stripes and yet she 
could not save her Son. Mary's heart went down with Him 
to the ground, as He fell from that terrible pillar of His 
scourging ! Oh, behold Him ! you mothers ! You fathers, 
behold the Virgin's Child, your God — Jesus Christ ! Tho 
soldiers amused themselves at the sight of His sufferings, and 



04 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



scoffed at Him as He lay prostrate. Recovering somewhat, 
after a time He opened His languid eyes and rose from that 
ground, — rose all torn and bleeding. They throw an old 
purple rag around His shoulders, and they set Him upon a 
stone. One of them has been, in the meantime, busily 
engaged in twisting and twining a crown made of some of 
those thorns, twisted, which they had prepared for the scourg- 
ing, — a crown in which seventy-two long thorns were put, so 
that they entered into the sacred head of our Lord. This 
crown was set upon his brow. Then a man came with a 
reed in his hand and struck those thorns deep into the tender 
forehead. They are fastened deeply in the most sensitive 
organ, where pain becomes maddening in its agony. He 
strikes the thorns in till even the sacred humanity of our 
Lord forces from him the cry of agony ! He strikes them in 
still deeper ! — deeper ! Oh, my God ! Oh, Father of Mercy ! 
And all this opens up new streams of blood ! — new fountains 
of love ! The blood streams clown, and the face of the Most 
High is hidden under its crimson veil. Now, now, indeed, 
O Pilate, — O wise and compromising Pilate, — now, indeed, 
you have gained your end ! You have proved yourself the 
friend of Caesar. Now, there is no fear but that the Jews, 
when they see Him, will be moved by compassion ! They 
bring Him back and they put Him standing before the 
Roman governor. His rugged Pagan heart is moved within 
him with horror when he sees the fearful example they have 
made of Him. Frightened when he beheld Him, he turned 
away his eyes : the spectacle was too terrible. He called 
for water and washed his hands. " I declare before God." he 
says, " I am innocent of this man's blood ! " He leads Him 
out on the balcony of his house. There was the raging 
multitude, swaying to and fro. Some are exciting the 
crowd, urging them to cry out to crucify Him ; some are 
preparing the Cross, others getting ready the hammer and 
nails, some thinking of the spot where they would crucify Him ? 
There they were arguing with diabolical rage. Pilate came 
forth in his robes of office. Soldiers stand on either side of 
him. Two soldiers bring in our Lord. His hands are tied. 
A reed is put in His hand in derision. Thorns are on His 
brow. Blood is flowing from every member of His sacred 
b^dy. An old tattered purple rag is flung over him. Pilata 
brings him out, and looking round on the multitude says : 
" JScce homo ! Behold the man ! You said I was no friend 
to Caesar. You said I was afraid to punish Him ! Behold Him 
now ! Is there a man among you who would have the heart 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



95 



to demand more punishment ? " Oh, Heaven and earth ! Oh, 
Heaven and earth ! The cry from out every lip — from out 
every heart is: " We are not yet satisfied ! Give Him to us ! 
Give him to us ! We will crucify him ! " " But," says 
Pilate, " I am innocent of His blood ! " And then came a 
word — and this word has brought a curse upon the Jews from 
that day to this. Then came the word that brought the con- 
sequences of a crime on their hard hearts and blinded intel- 
lects. They cried out, " His blood be upon us and upon our 
children! Crucify Him!" " But," says Pilate, " here is a 
man in prison; he is a robber and a murderer! And here 
is Jesus of Nazareth whom I declare to be innocent ! One of 
these I must release. Which will you have — Jesus or Bar- 
rabas?" And they cried out " Barrabas ! give us Barrabas ! 
But let Jesus be crucified ! " Here is compared the Son of God 
to the robber and the murderer ! And the robber and mur- 
derer is declared fit to live, and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, 
is declared fit only to die ! The vilest man in Jerusalem 
declared in that hour that he would not associate with our 
Lord, and that the Son of God was not worthy to breathe 
the air polluted by this man ! So Barrabas came forth rejoic- 
ing in His escape: and, as he mingled in the crowd, he too, 
threw up his hands and cried out, " Oh, let Him be crucified ! 
let Him be crucified ! " He is led forth from the tribunal of 
Pilate. And now just outside of the Prefect's door, there are 
men holding up a long, weighty, rude cross, that they had 
made rapidly; for they took two large beams, put one across 
the other, fastened them with great nails, and made it strong 
enough to uphold a full-grown man. There is the cross ! 
There is the man with the nails ! And there are all the accom- 
paniments of the execution. And He who is scarcely able to 
stand, — He, bruised and afflicted, — the Man of Sorrows, almost 
fainting with infirmity, He is told to take that cross upon His 
bleeding, wounded shoulders, and to go forward to the moun- 
tain of Calvary. Taking to him that cross, holding it to His 
wounded breast, putting to it in tender kisses the lips that 
were distilling blood, the Son of God, with the cross upon His 
shoulders, turns His faint and tottering footsteps towards the 
steep and painful way that led to Calvary. Behold Him as 
He goes forth ! That cross is a weight almost more than a 
man can carry: and it is upon the shoulders of one from 
whom all strength and manliness and courage are gone IS 
Behold the Redeemer as He toils painfully along, amid the 
shouts and shrieks of the enraged people ! Behold Him as lie 
toils along the fiinty way, the soldiers driving Him on, the 



96 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



people inciting them, every one rushing and hastening to Cal- 
vary, to witness the execution. John, the beloved disciple, fol- 
lows Him. A few of His faithful disciples toil along. But there 
is one who traces each of His blood-stained footsteps; there is 
one who follows Him with a breaking heart : there is one whose 
very soul within her is crucified and torn with the sword of sor- 
row. Oh, need I name the Mother, the Queen of Martyrs I 
In that hour of His martyrdom, Mary, the mother of Jesus, 
followed immediately in His footsteps, and her whole soul 
went forth in prayer for an opportunity to approach Him to 
wipe the blood from His sacred face. Oh, if they would only 
let her come to Him, and say, " My child ! I am with you ! " 
If they would only let her take in her womanly arms, from 
off the shoulders of her dear Son, that heavy cross that He 
cannot bear! But no! She must witness His misery; she 
must witness His pain. He toils along: He takes the first 
few steps up the rugged side of Calvary. Suddenly His heart 
ceases to beat; the light leaves His eyes; He sways, for a 
moment, to and fro; the weakness and the sorrow of death 
are upon Him; He totters, falls to the earth; and down, with 
a heavy crash, comes the weighty cross upon the prostrate 
form of Jesus Christ ! Oh, behold Him as for the third time 
He embraces that earth which is sanctified and redeemed by 
His love ! Mary rushes forward; Mary thinks her child is 
dead : she thinks that terrible cross must have crushed Him 
into the earth. She rushes forward; but with rude and bar- 
barous words the woman is flung aside. The cross is lifted 
tip and placed on the shoulders of Simon of Cyrene; and 
with blows and blasphemies the Saviour of the world is 
obliged to rise from that earth; and, worn with the sorrows 
and afflictions of death, faces the rugged steep on the summit 
of which is the place destined for His crucifixion. Arrived 
at the place they tear off His garments; they take from Him 
the seamless garment which His mother's loving hands had 
woven for Him; they take the humble clothing in which the 
Son of God had robed Himself, — saturated, steeped as it is in 
His blood ; and in removing them they open afresh every 
wound and once again the saving blood of Christ is poured 
out upon the ground. With rude, blasphemous words the 
God-man is told to lie down upon that cross. Of His own free 
will He stretches His tender limbs, puts forth His hands, and 
stretches out His feet at their order. The executioners take 
the nails and the hammer, and they kneel upon His sacred 
bosom ; they press out His hands till they bring the palms 
to where they made the holes to fit the nails. They stretch 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



97 



Him out upon that cross, even as the Paschal Lamb was 
stretched out upon the altar ; they kneel upon the cross ; they 
lay the nails upon the palms of His hands. The first blow 
drives the nail deep into His hands, the next "blow sends it 
into the cross. Blow follows blow. They are inflamed with 
the rage of hell. Earnestly they work, — and hell delights 
in the scene, — tearing the muscles and the sinews of His 
hands and feet. Rude, terrible blows fall on these nails, and 
re-echo in the heart of the Virgin, until that heart seems to 
be broken at the foot of the cross. And, now, when they 
have driven these nails to the heads, fastening Him to the 
wood, the cross is lifted up from the ground. Slowly, 
solemnly, the figure of Jesus Christ, all red with blood, all 
torn and disfigured, rises into the air, until the cross, attain- 
ing its full height, is fixed into its socket in the earth. The 
banner of salvation is flung out over the world ; and Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, and the Redeemer of mankind, 
appears in mid-air, and looks out over the crowd and over 
Jerusalem, over hill and valley, far away towards the sea of 
Galilee, and all around the horizon ; and the dying eyes of 
the Saviour are turned over the land and the people for whom 
He is shedding His blood. Uplifted in mid-air, — the eterna] 
sacrifice of the Redeemer for everlasting, — hanging from 
these three terrible nails on the cross — for three hours He 
remained. Every man took up his position. Mary, His 
Mother, approaches, for this is the hour of her agony ; she 
must suffer in soul what He suffers in body. John, the dis- 
ciple of love, approaches, and takes his stand under his Mas* 
ter's outstretched hands. Mary Magdalen rushes through 
the guards ; there are the feet of her Lord and Master ; they 
are now bathed with other tears — with the tears of blood 
that save the world ; there are the feet which it was her joy 
to weep over ! And now she clasps the cross, and pours out 
her tears, until they mingle with the blood which flows down 
His feet. There are the Pharisees and the Scribes, who had 
gained their point ; they come and stand before the cross ; 
they look upon that figure of awful pain and misery; they 
see those thorns sunk deeply into that drooping head, with 
no love in their hearts ; they see the agony expressed in the 
eyes of the victim who is dying; and then looking up exult- 
ingly, the}- rejoice and say to Him: " You said you could 
destroy the Temple, and build it up in three days ; now, 
come down from the cross, and we will believe in and wor- 
ship you." The Roman soldier stood there, admiring the 
courage with which the man died. The third hour is 



93 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



approaching. The penitent thief on His right hand had 
received his pardon. A sudden gloom gathers round tho 
scene. 

Before we come to the last moment, I ask you to con- 
sider Jesus Christ as your God. I ask you to consider the 
sacrifice that He made, and to consider the circumstances 
under which He approached that last moment of His life. 
All He had in the world was some little money : it was kept 
to give to the poor ; Judas had that, and he had stolen it. 
Christ had literally nothing but the simple garments with 
which He had been clothed ; these the soldiers took, and they 
raffled for them under His dying eyes. "What remained for 
him ? The love of His mother ; the sympathy of John ? But 
He, uplifted on the cross, said to Mary. " Woman behold 
thy son ! " And to John He said, " Son, behold thy 
mother ! " " Thus I give one to the other ; let that love 
suffice : and leave Me all alone and abandoned to die." 
W r hat remained to Him ? His reputation for sanctity, for 
wisdom and for power. His reputation for sanctity was so 
great, that the people said " this man never could do such 
things if He had not come from God." And as to His wis- 
dom, His reputation for ;wisdom was such that we read, not 
one of the Pharisees or Doctors of the Law had the courage 
to argue with Him. His reputation for power was such that 
the people all said : " This man speaks and preaches, not as 
the Pharisees, but as one having power." Christ had sacri- 
ficed and given up His reputation for sanctity, for He was 
crucified as a blasphemer and a teacher of evil. His reputa- 
tion for wisdom was sacrificed in the course of His Passion, 
when Herod declared that He was a fool. Clothing Him in 
a white garment in derision, He was marched through the 
streets of Jerusalem, from Herod's palace to Pilate's house, 
dressed as a fool ; and men came to their doors to point the 
finger of scorn and laugh at Him, and reproached each other 
for having listened to His doctrine. His reputation for 
power was gone. They came to the foot of the cress and 
said — " X ow, if you have the power, come down from that 
cross and we will believe you." Now, all the man's earthly 
possessions are gone; His few garments are gone: Mary's 
love and her sustaining compassion are gone ; His reputation 
is gone ; He is one wound, from head to foot ; the anger of 
man has vented itself upon Him. What remains for Him ? 
The ineffable consolations of His divinity ; the infinite peace 
of the God-head, the Father ! Oh, mystery of mysteries ! 
Oh, Man of Sorrow ! Oh, Lord <jTesus Christ, cling to that ! 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



09 



Whatever else may be taken from you, that cannot be taken 
away. Oh, Master, lean upon Thy God-head ! Oh, cruci- 
fied, bleeding, dying Lord, do not give up that which is Thy 
peace and Thy comfort, — Thy joy in the midst of all this suf- 
fering ! But what do I see ? The dying head is lifted up ; 
the drooping eyes are cast heavenwards ; an expression of 
agony absorbing all others comes over the dying face, and a 
voice breaks forth from the quivering, agonized lips — " My 
God ! My God ! why hast Thou forsaken Me ! " The al> 
sufficient comfort of the divinity and the sustaining power of 
the Father's love are put away from Him in that hour ! A 
cloud came between Jesus Christ upon the Cross, the victim 
of our sins, and the Father's face in Heaven ; and that cloud 
was the concentrated anger of God which came upon His 
divine Son, because of our sins and our transgressions. Not 
that His divinity quitted Him. ISTo ; He was still God ; but 
by His own act and free will, He put away the comfort and 
the sustaining power of the divinity for a time, in order that 
every element of sorrow, every grief, every misery of which 
the greatest victim of this earth was capable, should be all 
concentrated upon Him at the hour of His death. And then, 
having used these solemn words, He waited the moment 
when the Father's will should separate the soul from the 
body. 

Now, Mary and John have embraced : Judas is struggling 
in the last throes of his self-imposed death : Peter has wept 
his tears. The devil for a moment triumphs : and the man- 
God upon the cross, awaits the hour and the moment of the 
world's redemption. The sun in the Heavens is withdrawn 
behind mysterious clouds : and though it was but three 
o'clock in the day, a darkness like that of midnight cams 
upon the land. Men looked upon each other in horror and in 
terror. Presently a rumbling noise was heard : and they 
looked around and saw the hills and the mountains tremble on 
their bases : the very ground seemed to rock beneath them ; 
it groans as though the earth were breaking up from its cen- 
tre ; the rocks are splitting up ; and round them strange fig- 
ures are flitting here and there ; the graves are opened, and 
the dead entombed there are walking in the dark ways before 
them. "What is this? Who is this terrible man that we 
have put on that cross?" The earth quakes ; darkness is still 
upon it ; perfect silence reigns over Calvary, unbroken by 
the cry of the dying Redeemer, — unbroken by the voice of 
the scoffers — unbroken by the sobs of the Magdalen. Every 
heart seems to stand still. Then, over that silence, in the 



100 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



midst of that darkness, is heard the terrible cry — " Oh, Father, 
into Thy hands I commend My spirit ! " The head of the 
Lord Jesus Christ droops ; the man upon the cross is dead ! 
And the world is saved and redeemed ! The moment the cry 
came forth from the dying lips of Jesus Christ, the devil, 
who stood there, knew that it was the Son of God who was 
crucified and that his day was gone. Howling in despair he fled 
from the Redeemer's presence into the lowest depths of hell. 
The world is saved ! The world is redeemed ! Man's sin is 
wiped out! The blood that washed away the iniquity of our 
race has ceased to flow from the dead and pulseless heart of 
Jesus. Wrapt in prayer, Mary bowed down her head under 
the weight of her sorrows ! the Magdalen looked up and 
beheld the dead face of her Redeemer. John stretched out his 
hands and looked upon that face. The Roman soldier lays 
hold of his lance, under some strange impulse. Word comes 
that the body was to be taken down ; they did not know 
whether our Lord was dead ; there might yet some remnant 
of life remain in Him ; the question was to prove 
that he was dead, and this man approaches. As a 
warrior he puts his lance in rest, rushes forward with all 
the strength of his arm, and drives the lance right into the 
heart of the Lord ? The heavy cross sways ; it seems as if 
it is about to fall; the lance quivers for an instant in the 
wound ; the man draws it forth again ; and forth from the 
heart of the dead Christ streamed the waters of life and the 
blood of redemption ! The soldier drew back his lance, and 
the next moment, on his knees, before the crucified, wuth the 
lance dripping with the blood of the Lord still in his hand, he 
cried out : " Truly this man was the Son of God ! " Then the 
earthquake began again ; the dead were seen passing in fear- 
ful array, turning the eyes of the tomb upon the faces of those 
Pharisees who had crucified the Lord. And the people, fright- 
ened, became conscious that they had committed a terrible 
crime, when they heard Longinus, the Roman soldier, cry out, 
— " This Man is truly the Son of God, whom you have cruci- 
fied." Then came down from Calvary the crowds, exclaiming 
— "Yes truly, this is the Son of God." And they went down 
the hill-side, weeping and beating their breasts ! Oh, how 
much we cost ! Oh, how great was the price that He paid 
for us ! Oh, how generously He gave all He had — and He 
was God — for your salvation and mine ! It is well to rejoice 
and be here ; it is well to come and contemplate the blessings 
which that blessed, gracious Lord has conferred on us. It is, 
also, well to consider what He paid and how much it cost 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



101 



Him. And if we consider this, then, with Mary the mother, 
and Mary the Magdalen, and John the Evangelist and 
friend — then will our hearts be afflicted. For the soul that is 
not afflicted on this day shall be wiped out from the pages of 
the Book of Life. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Speech delivered in the rooms of the " Galway Club," by the 
Rev. Father Bn*KE/on the occasion of his reception by the members 
of said club, Monday evening, April 1st.] 

Mr. Chaismax and Gextlemex of the Galway Club : I 
must confess that, though as a priest, during the past I have 
had my trials, still, thanks be to Cod, I have also receive^, 
consolation in my ministry. These kindnesses, although con- 
solations, were administered solely by friendly, very friendly 
strangers, who were, and are still, dear to me. But to-day the 
consolation I feel among you is dearer to me, in a worldly 
sense, than ail, because they come to me from my own flesh 
and blood, from the children of that dear old city and prov- 
ince which I love. Around me here are all the tenderest as- 
sociations of my early years, when every nook and corner 
around that grand old city of the far "West was thoroughly 
known to me. Yes. I am proud to be a priest, and proud 
to be a Catholic ; but if I were not a priest, I would be proud 
and thankful for being not only an Irishman but a Galway man. 
[Here Father Burke was interupted for somes minutes by a 
loud and continued cheering.] The only drop of blood circu- 
lating in my veins that is not Galway came from the Western 
side, for, you know, that when Cromwell and his accursed 
hordes visited the lovely plains of Leinster, and the grand old 
rugged hills of Ulster, all that was ancient and noble in 
Ireland was driven into Connaught. Oliver Cromwell gave 
them their choice to cross the lordly Shannon, and go into 
Connaught ; or cross the river Styx, and go to hell. Grand 
in every feature, whole in every feeling, in their poverty and 
distress — in the condition and sufferings of their children 
and women, they chose Connaught for their portion and left hell 
to him (laughter and cheers). I have always felt proud of 
being an Irishman, but for this very reason I feel wonderfully 
proud of being a Galway man. When once asked by a 



102 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



stranger what country I was of, I replied, I came from the 
noblest and the bravest of the Irish, and from the coast of 
grand old Galway, but while I declared myself a Galway man 
I only meant to assert that he should be the best type of an 
Irishman, and I am glad to see that the " Galway Club" throws 
open its doors not only to Galway men but to Irishmen. I do 
not advocate provincialism, ah ! no; that was once the bano 
■ — the curse of Ireland ; and thank God it has ceased to exist 
m these our better days when the rising sun of Ireland tells 
all Irishmen as well as Galway men to be united. Ah ! when 
we were united I defy any man to challenge Ireland's bravery 
(great cheering). Never was seen such a host of heroes for 
faith and fatherland; and it was only when the enemy who 
assailed us knew how to divide us, that we lost the true glory 
of our nationality, and that the cursed Saxon was enabled 
to turn his sword upon us to advantage (loud cheers). Far 
be it from me, therefore, to favor provincialism; hence I am 
glad to have the privilege of addressing all in this assembly 
as well as the Galway Club. But we must not forget that 
Tara was the City of the Kings, where the Earls of Tyrone 
and Tyrconnell once assembled; and therefore it is quite suffi- 
cient if any man can claim the glorious title of being an Irish- 
man (loud cheers). Still I feel a pride in meeting the men 
of my native town. I don't know how it is, but I suppose it 
is because the boy perhaps has not yet died out in the man. 
You all remember the holy old monk of Galway, poor Paul 
J. O'Connor. * Well, when I go back to that good old city, 
and kneel down to receive his blessing, as Nicholas Burke, 
and he in turn kneels for mine, I w T ill then take him by the 
hand and tell him what good hearts the Galway- Americans 
still have (cheers). Oh ! there is nothing more sacred than 
the recollections of early days. We remember in them our 
pleasures and our innocence: — every nook and corner, — every 
pleasant scene at fair or market : — or what could have been 
more pleasant than swimming on the western waves : — the 
beautiful hills we so often trod — the flights of Laurence Geo- 
ghegan's pigeons (laughter) : — and the Galway illuminations, 
more impressive than all (cheers and laughter) : — all these,— 
nay more, which can seldom be forgotten, — are nothing else 
than those early impressions enshrined in the chambers of the 
memory (renewed cheers). 

In response to the soul-stirring address read to him by the 
Chairman of the Committee, Mr. Deely, the good priest 
said — I will not say that this is one of the proudest moments 
of my life, but it is, at least, one of the happiest. This 



THE CATHOLIC M3SSI02T. 



103 



address, which, you. gentlemen have presented to me, is 
something- I will unveil, at no distant day, before old Watt 
Burke, and tell him how and from whom I received it. — Here 
Father Burke encouraged, by a few stirring suggestions, the 
formation and increase of clubs like the Galway Club. He 
said — Associations were formed for good or evil ; when the 
aim or object was good, and the means unobjectionable, the 
association was good — otherwise it was formed for destruc- 
tion, as I have seen lately in France, Italy, and sometimes in 
this country, especially disclaiming all civil and ecclesiastical 
order ; and should we not band together clubs like the Gal- 
way Club, — not for the purpose of creating discord, but for 
God, for country, and religion, for our own self-reliance and 
self-support ? Let us extend the hand of friendship and broth- 
erly-love to all, for there is more good in many men than all 
are inclined to give them credit for. Be united with all, 
then, for God and the dear old land which you profess to 
love : and never be ashamed (as, alas ! too many are.) to 
declare yourselves Irishmen (tremendous cheering). Why 
should we be ashamed of our country, whose career has been 
a life-long struggle for her religion and her freedom ! I 
appeal to the recording angel of history, if my native land 
has ever been guilty of baseness or willingly submitted to 
slavery. Never has she lost her faith — sympathy — honor 
— patriotism, during 1500 years ; never has she ceased to 
acknowledge herself a nation : — and we shall be a nation 
yet. (Immense cheering, lasting several minutes.) Yet, it is 
true, our patriots have been hated by England; but she 
could never raise heroes and men of genius to equal even 
some of the great, heroic, living Irishmen of to-day. I 
appeal to the shades and memories of Grattan, to those of 
Curran, enshrined in the heart of her heart ; to the life and 
career of O'Cennell, and the self-sacrificing spirit of the 
chieftain by my side (pointing to General Bourke) whose 
very name and presence you must all revere and love, for he 
and his associates loved Ireland and showed how they loved 
her. (Great cheering). England treated all, friend — foe — 
with the same ingratitude ; but who will not confess that 
Ireland's gratitude has become proverbial, and is most cer- 
tainly a living moral example to all the nations of the earth ? 
I am a priest : but I am a man: and, as I glory to speak for 
the glory of the sanctuary as a priest, so also do I speak for 
the glory of my country as a man. (Cheers.) The priest 
and the men throughout the homes of Galway were always 
heart and hand. He was always to them their " Soggarth 



104 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Aroon" and they, to him, his best beloved children. He 
was by their side upon the rampart as well as at the sick bed. 
Hence we should all be as one man. No prejudice should 
be introduced among us, no aristocratic distance be obser- 
ved ; but the Galway- American millionaire and the jDOverty- 
stricken Galway man of New York should imagine them- 
selves, not in New York, bat in the fine old city of Galway. 
(Loud and continued cheers). If every Irishman only loved 
his poor friends how happy all would be. Oh, if Ireland and 
Ireland's sons were united in heart and hand throughout the 
world, what could they not accomplish ! They would rule 
the world, for they would rule America, and America would 
rule the world (tremendous cheering). Whatever your 
future be, my dear friends, your past is Ireland's. No mat- 
ter, then, how bright your prospects, if you forget the green 
graves of your forefathers you are not men, nor the blood of 
Irishmen is not in you. No ; we must not forget her ; for, 
to use the words of the Scripture, " She is the rock from 
which we are chipped" (loud cheers). For Ireland then do I 
ask your prayers. May we all live, not only to see her 
struggling more successfully, but to see her what she ought 
to be — a nation, with the crown of freedom upon her fair 
and beautiful brow. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in the large hall 
of the Cooper Institute, New York, on Friday evening, April 4.] 



" THE HISTORY OF IRELAND, AS TOLD TN HER RUINS." 



Ladies and Gentlemen — I have to apologize to you, in 
earnestness, for appearing to you this evening in my habit 
[the white habit of his Order]. (Applause.) The reason 
why I put off my black cloth coat and put on this dress — the 
Dominican habit — is, first of all, because I never feel at home 
in a black coat (cheers). When God called me, the only son 
of an Irish father and an Irish mother, from the home of the 
old people, and told me that it was His will that I should 
belong to Him in the Sanctuary, the father and mother gavo 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



105 



me up -without a sigh, because they were Irish parents, and 
had the Irish faith and love for the Church in their hearts 
(cheers). And from the day I took this habit — from that 
day to this — I never felt at home in any other dress, and if 
I were to come before you this evening in black cloth, like a 
layman, and not like an Irish Dominican friar, I might, per- 
haps, break down in my lecture (laughter). But there is 
another reason why I appear before you in this white habit : 
because I am come to speak to you of the ruins that cover the 
face of the old land ; I am come to speak to you, and to tell 
you of the glory and the shame, and the joy and the sorrow, 
that these ruins so eloquently tell of; and when I look upon 
them, in spirit now, my mind sweeps over the intervening 
ocean, and I stand in imagination under the ivied and moss- 
covered arches of Athenry, or Sligo, or Clare-Galway, or 
Kilconnell ; the view that rises before me of the former 
inmates of these holy places is a vision of white-robed 
Dominicans, and of brown Franciscans; and, therefore, in 
coming to speak to you in this garment, of the glorious his- 
tory which they tell us, I feel more myself, more in conso- 
nance with the subject of which I have to speak in appearing 
before you as the child and the representative — no matter 
how unworthy — of the Irish friars — the Irish priests and 
patriots who sleep in Irish graves to-night (tremendous 
cheers). 

And now, my friends, the most precious — the grandest — 
inheritance of any people, is that people's history. All that 
forms the national character of a people, their tone of thought, 
their devotion, their love, their sympathies their antipathies, 
their language, — all this is found in their history, as the effect 
is found in its cause, as the Autumn speaks of the Spring. 
And the philosopher who wishes to analyze a people's char- 
acter and to account for it, — to account for the national 
desires, hopes, aspirations, for the strong sympathies or 
antipathies that sway a people, — must go back to the deep 
recesses of their history ; and there, in ages long gone by, 
will he find the seeds that produced the fruit that he 
attempts to account for. And he wall find that the nation 
of to-day is but the child and the offspring of the nation of 
by-gone ages ; for it is written truly, that " the child is 
father to the man." When, therefore, we come to consider 
the desires of nations, we find that every people is most 
strongly desirous to preserve its history even as every man 
is anxious to preserve the record of his life ; for history is the 
record of a people's life. Hence it is that, in the libraries 



103 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



of the more ancient nations we find the earliest histories o£ 
the primal al races of mankind, written upon the durable 
vellum, the imperishable asbestos, or sometimes deeply 
carved, in mystic and forgotten characters, on the granite 
stone, or pictured rock, showing the desire of the people to 
preserve their history, which is to preserve the memory of 
them, — just as the old man, dying, said " Lord, keep my mem- 
ory green ! " 

But, besides these more direct and documentary eviden- 
ces, the history of every nation is enshrined in the national 
traditions, in the national music and song ; much more it is 
written in the public buildings that cover the face of the 
land. These, silent and in ruins, tell most eloquently their 
tale. To-day " the stone may be crumbled, the wall de- 
cayed ; " the clustering ivy may, perhaps, uphold the tot- 
tering ruin to which it clung in the days of its strength; 
but, 

"The sorrows, the joys of -winch once they were part, 
Still round them, like visions of yesterday, throng." 

They are the voices of the past ; they are the voices of ages 
long gone by. They rear their venerable and beautiful gray 
heads high over the land they adorn; and they tell us the 
tale of the glory or of the shame, of the strength or of the 
weakness of the prosperity or of the adversity of the nation 
to which they belong — (cheers). This is the volume which 
we are about to open ; this is the voice which we are about 
to call forth from their gray and ivied ruins that cover the 
green bosom of Ireland : we are about to go back up the 
highways of history, and, as it were, to breast and to stem 
the stream of time, to-day, taking our start from the present 
hour in Ireland. (Loud cheers) . - What have we here? It 
is a stately church — rivalling, — perhaps surpassing, — in its 
glory the grandeur of by-gone times. TTe behold the solid 
buttresses, the massive wall, the high tower, the graceful 
spire piercing the clouds, and upholding high towards heaven, 
the symbol of man's redemption, the glorious sign of the Cross, 
"We see in the stone windows the massive tracery, so solid, 
sc strong and so delicate. What does this tell us ? Here is 
this Church, so grand, yet so fresh and new and clean from 
the mason's hand. What does it tell us ? It tells us of a 
race that has never decayed ; it tells us of a people that have 
never lost their faith nor their love ; it tells us of a nation as 
strong in its energy for every highest and holiest purpose, to- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIOX. 



107 



day, as it was in the ages that are past and gone for ever 
(renewed cheering). 

We advance just half a century up the highway of time ; 
and we come upon that which has been familiar, perhaps, to 
many amongst you, as well as to me, — the plain, unpretend- 
ing little chapel, in some by-lane of the town or city, — or the 
plain and humble little chapel in some by-way in the country, 
with its thatched roof, its low ceiling, its earthern floor, its 
■"wooden altar. What does this tell us ? It tells us of a peo- 
ple struggling against adversity ; it tells us of a people mak- 
ing their first effort, after 300 years of blood, to build up a 
house, however humble, for their God (cheers) ; it tells us of 
a people who had not yet shaken off the traditions of their sla- 
very, upon whose hands the chains still hang, and the wounds 
inflicted by those chains are still rankling ; it tells us of a 
people who scarcely yet know how to engage in the glorious 
work of church edification, because they scarcely yet realized 
the privilege that they were to be allowed to live in the land 
that bore them (loud cheers). Let us reverently how down 
our heads and salute these ancient places — these ancient, 
humble little chapels, in town or country, where we, — we men 
of middle age, — made our first confession and received our 
first communion : let us salute these places, hallowed in our 
memories by the first, and therefore the strongest, the purest, 
holiest recollections and associations of our lives ; and pil- 
grims of history, let us turn into the dreary solitary road that 
lies before us. It is a road of three hundred years of desola- 
tion and bloodshed ; it is a road that leads through martyrs' 
and patriots' graves ; it is a road that is wet with the tears 
aud with the blood of a persecuted and dovrn-trodden people ; 
it is a road that is pointed out to us by the sign of the Cross, 
the emblem of the nation's faith, and by the site of the mar- 
tyr's grave, the emblem of the nation's undying fidelity to 
God (cheers). 

And now what venerable ruin is this which rises before 
our eyes, moss-crowned, imbedded in clustering ivy ? It is a 
church, for we see the mullions of the great east window of 
the- sanctuary, through which once flowed, through angel 
and saints depicted thereon, the mellow sunshine that warm- 
ed up the arch above, and made mosaics upon the church and 
altar. It is a church of the mediaeval choral order, — for I 
see the lancet windows, the choir where the religious were ac- 
customed to chaunt, — yet popular, and much frequented by the 
people, for I see outside the choir an ample space: the side-aisles 
are unincumbered, and the side-chapels with altars, — the mind 



108 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



of the architect clearly intending an ample space for the peo< 
pie; yet it is not too large a church ; for it is generally one that 
the preacher's voice can easily fill. Outside of it runs the 
square of the ruined cloister, humble enough, yet most beau- 
tiful in its architecture. But now, church and cloister alike 
are filled with the graves — the homes of the silent dead. Do 
I recall to the loving memory of any one among you scenes 
that have been familiar to your eyes in the dear and the green 
old land ? Are there not those among you who have looked 
with eyes softened by love, and by the sadness of the recol- 
lections recalled to the mind under the chancel and the choir 
under the ample space of nave and aisle of the old abbey of 
Athenry, or in the old Abbey of Kilconnell, or such as these? 
What tale do these tell ? They tell of a nation that, although 
engaged in a hand-to-hand and desperate struggle for its 
national life, yet in the midst of its wars was never unmind- 
ful of its God; — they tell of Ireland when the clutch of the 
Saxon was upon her, — when the sword was unsheathed that 
was never to know its scabbard from that day until this, and 
that never will, until the diadem of perfect freedom rests upon 
the virgin brow of Ireland. (Here the audience burst into 
a prolonged shout of applause, which was again and again 
repeated.) They tell of the glorious days when Ireland's 
Church and Ireland's Nationality joined hands; and when 
the priest and the people rose up to enter upon a glorious com- 
bat for freedom. These were the homes of the Franciscan and 
the Dominican friars, — the men who, during three hundred 
years of their residence in Ireland, recalled in these cloisters 
the ancient glories of Lismore, and of Glendalough, and of 
Armagh; the men who, from the time they first raised these 
cloisters, never left the land, — never abandoned the old soil, 
but lingered around their ancient homes of happiness, of sanct- 
ity, and of peace, and tried to keep near the old walls, just 
as Magdalen lingered round the empty tomb, on Easter morn- 
ing, at Jerusalem (great cheering). They tell of tne sane 
tuaries, where the hunted head of the Irish patriot found ref. 
uge and a place of security; they tell the Irish historian of the 
National Councils formed for State purposes within them. 
These venerable walls, if they could speak, would tell us how 
the wavering were encouraged and strengthened, and the 
brave and gallant fired with the highest and noblest purpose 
for God and Erin; how the traitor was detected and 
the false-hearted denounced; and how the Nation's life-blood 
was kept warm, and her wounds were staunched by the wise 
councils of the old Franciscan and Dominican friars (cheers). 



TIIE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



109 



All this and more would these walls tell if they could speak; 
for they have witnessed all this. They witnessed it until the 
day came — the day of war, the sword, and blood — that drove 
forth their saintly inmates from their loving shelter and 
devoted themselves to desolation and decay. 

Let us bow down, fellow Irishmen, with reverence and 
with love, as we pass under the shadow of these ancient 
walls. And now stepping a few years — scarcely fifty years 
further on the road of our history, — passing as we go along 
under the frowning, dark feudal castles of the Fitzgeralds, 
of the De Laceys, the Decourceys, the Fitzadelms, and, I 
regret to say, the De Burgs, — the castles that tells us always 
of the terror of the invaders of the land, hiding themselves 
in their strongholds, because they could not trust to the love 
of the people, who hated them ; and because they were afraid 
to meet the people in the open field (renewed cheers) ; — pass- 
ing under the frowning shadows of these castles, suddenly 
we stand amazed — crushed as it were to the earth, by the 
glories that rise before us, in the ruins of Mellifont, in the 
ruins of Dunbrodie, in the awful ruins of Holy Cross and 
of Cashel, that we see yet uplifting, in solemn grandeur, 
their stately heads in ruined beauty over the land which 
they once adorned. There do we see the vestiges of the 
most magnificent architecture, some of the grandest build- 
ings that ever yet were raised upon this earth for God or 
for man (renewed cheering). There do we see the lofty side 
walls pierced with huge windows, filled with the most deli- 
cate tracery ; there, when we enter in we throw our eyes 
aloft with wonder, and see the groined, massive arches of the 
ceiling upholding the mighty tower ; there do w T e see the 
grandeur of the ancient Cistercians, and the Canons Regular 
of St. Augustine, and the Benedictines. "What tale do they 
tell us ? Oh, they tell us a glorious tale of our history and 
of our people. These were the edifices that were built and 
founded in Ireland during the brief respite that the nation 
had, from the day that she drove the last Dane out, until th? 
day that the first accursed Norman came (cheers). A short 
time, a brief period : too brief, alas ! too brief; Ireland, 
exhausted after her three hundred years of Danish invasion, 
turned her first thoughts and her first energies to build up 
the ancient places that were ruined, — to restore and to clothe 
the sanctuaries of her faith, with a splendor such as tho 
nation never had seen before. 

We will pass on. And, now, a mountain road lies before 
us. The land is filled again, for three centuries, with deso 



110 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



lation and with bloodshed and with sorrow. The hill-sides, 
on either hand of our path, are strewn with the bodies of 
the slain ; the valleys are filled with desolation and ruin ; the 
air resounds to the ferocious battle-cry of the Dane, and to 
the brave battle-cry of the Celt, intermingled with the wail- 
ing of the widowed mother and the ravished maid ; the air 
is filled with the crash and the shock of battle. In terrible 
onset, the lithe, active mail-clad, fair-haired, blue-eyed 
warriors of the North meet the dark, stalwart Celt, and they 
close in mortal combat. Toiling along, pilgrims of history 
as we are, we come to the summit of Tara's Hill, and there 
we look in vain for a vestige of Ireland's ruins. But now, 
after these three hundred years of our backward journey over 
the highway of history, we breathe the upper air. The sun- 
shine of the eighth eentury, and of Ireland's three cen- 
turies of Christianity is upon our path. We breathe the 
purer air ; we are among the mountains of God ; and a sight 
the most glorious that nation ever presented opens itself 
before our eyes — the sight of Ireland's first three centuries of 
the glorious Faith of St. Patrick. Peace is upon the land. 
Schools rise upon every hill and in every valley. Every 
city is an immense school. The air again is filled with the 
sound of many voices ; for students from every clime under 
the sun — the German, the Pict, the Cinibri, the Frank, the 
Italian, the Saxon, are all mingled together, conversing 
together in the universal language of the Church, Rome's 
old Latin, They have come, and they have covered the 
land ; they have come in thousands and in tens of thousands, 
to hear from the lips of the world-renowned Irish saints all 
the lore of ancient Greece and Rome, and to study in the 
lives of these saints the highest degree and the noblest inter- 
pretation of Christian morality and Christian perfection 
(cheers). Wise rulers governed the land ; her heroes were 
moved to mighty acts ; and these men, who came from every 
clime to the university of the world— to the great masters of 
the nations — go back to their respective countries and tell 
the glorious tale of Ireland's strength and Ireland's sanctity, 
— of the purity of the Irish maidens, — of the learning and 
saintliness of the Irish priesthood, of the wisdom of her 
kings and rulers — of the sanctity of her people ; — until at 
length, from out the recesses of history, there comes, floating 
upon the breezes of time, the voice of an admiring world, 
that proclaims my native land, in that happy epoch, and 
gives to her the name of the island oi heroes of saints and 
of sages (loud applause). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



Ill 



Look up. In imagination we stand now upon the high- 
eat level of Ireland's first Christianity. Above us, we 
behold the venerable hill-top of Tara ; and, beyond that, 
again, far away, and high up on the mountain, inaccessible 
by any known road of history, lies amid the gloom, — the 
mysterious cloud that hangs around the cradle of every 
ancient race, looming forth from pre-historic obscurity, — we 
behold the mighty Round Towers of Ireland. There they 
stand — 

"The Pillar Towers of Ireland ! how wondrously they stand 
By the rushing streams, in the silent glens and the valleys of the land — 
In mystic file throughout the isle, they rear their heads sublimej — 
Those gray old pillar temples, — those conquerors of time." 

— (Great cheering.) 

Now, having gone up to the cradle and fountain-head of 
our history as told by its monuments and its ruins, we shall 
pause a little before we begin again our downward course. 
We shall pause for a few moments under the shadows of 
Ireland's Round Towers. There they stand, most perfect in 
their architecture. Stone fitted into stone with the most 
artistic nicety and regularity ; every stone bound to its bed 
by a cement as hard as the stone itself ; a beautiful calcula- 
tion of the weight which was to be put upon it, and the foun- 
dation which was to sustain it, has arrived at this, — that, 
though thousands of years have passed over their hoary 
heads, there they stand, as firm to-day as on the day when 
they were first erected. There they stand, in perfect form, 
in perfect perpendicular; and the student of art, in the 19th 
century can find matter for admiration and for wonder in the 
evidence of Ireland's civilization speaking loudly and elo- 
quently by the voice of her most ancient Round Towers 
(cheers). Who built them ? You have seen them ; they are 
all over the island. The traveller sails up the placid bosom 
of the lovely Blackwater, and while he admires its varied 
beauties, and his very heart within him is ravished by its 
loveliness, he benolds, high above its green banks, amid the 
ruins of ancient Lismore, a venerable Round Tower lifting 
its grey head into the air. As he goes on, passing, as in a 
dream of delight, now by the valleys and the hills of lovely 
Wicklow, he admires the weeping alders that hang over the 
stream in sweet Avoca ; — he admires the bold heights throw- 
ing their outlines so sharp and clear against the sky, and 
clothed to their very summits with the sweet smelling pur- 
ple heather ; — he admires all this, until, at length, in a deep 



112 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



valley in the very heart of the hills, he beholds, reflecting 
itself in the deep waters of still Glendalough, the venerable 
"Round Tower of other days" (cheers). Or he has taken 
his departure from the Island of Saints, and when his ship's 
prow is turned towards the setting sun. he beholds upon the 
head-lands of the iron-bound coast of Mayo or western Gal- 
way the Round Tower of Ireland, the last thing the eye of 
the lover or traveller beholds (renewed cheers). Who built 
these towers, or for what purpose were they built ? There 
is no record of reply, although the question has been 
repeated, age after age, for thousands of years. Who can 
tell ? They go so far back into the mists of history, as to 
have the lead of all the known events in the history of our 
native land. Some say that they are of Christian origin ; 
others, again, say, with equal probability, and, perhaps, 
greater, that these venerable monuments are far more ancient 
than Ireland's Catholicity ; that they were the temples, of a 
by-gone religion, and perhaps, of a long-forgotten race. 
They may have been the temples of the ancient Fire TTor- 
shipers of Ireland ; and the theory has been mooted that, 
in the time when our remotest forefathers worshipped the 
rising sun, the priest of the sun was accustomed to climb to 
the summit of the Round Towor, to turn his face to the east, 
and watch with anxiety the rising of the morning star, as it 
came up trembling in its silver beauty, above the eastern 
hills. Then, when the first rays of the sun illumined the val- 
leys, he hailed its rising, and proclaimed to the people around 
him their duty of worship to the coming God. This is a the- 
ory that would connect Ireland's Round Towers with the 
most ancient form of religion — the false religion which truth 
dispelled when, coining with the sun of Heaven, and showing 
before Irish intellect the glories of the risen Saviour, — the 
brightness of the Heavenly sun dimned for ever the glory of 
the earthly, and dispelled the darkness of the human soul, 
which had filled the land before with its gloom (loud cheer-). 
This is not the time nor the place to enter into an archseolog- 
ical argument as to whether the Round Towers aie of Pagan 
or Christian origin, or as to whether they are the offspring cf 
t-he famous Goban Saor. or of any other architect (laughtei), 
or of the men of the fifth or of the sixth centuries ; or 
whether they go back into the times of which no vestige 
remains upon the pages of history or in the traditions of 
men ; — this, I say, is not the time to do it. I attempted this 
once, and while 1 was pursuing my argument, as I imagined, 
very learnedly and very profoundly, I saw a man sitting 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



113 



opposite to me open his mouth ; and he gave a yaw.a (laugh- 
ter) ; and I said in my own mind, to myself, " My dear 
friend, if you do not close your dissertation that man will 
never shut his mouth ; " for I thought the top of his head 
would come off (tremendous laughter and cheers). 

But no matter what may be the truth of this theory cr 
that, concerning the Round Towers, one thing is certain, — 
and this is the point to which I wish to speak, — that as they 
Btand to-day, in the strength of their material, in the beauty 
of their form, in the perfection of their architecture, in the 
scientific principles upon which they were built, and which 
they revealed, they are the most ancient among the records 
of the most ancient nations, and distinctly tell the glorious 
tale of the early civilization of the Irish people (cheers). For 
my friends, remember that among the evidences of progress 
of civilization, among the nations, there is no more powerful 
argument or evidence than that which is given by their pub- 
lic buildings. When you reflect that many centuries after- 
wards, — ages after ages, — even after Ireland had become 
Catholic, — there was no such thing in England as a stone 
building of any kind, much less a stone Church, — when you 
reflect that outside the pale of the ancient civilization of 
Greece and Rome there was no such thing known among the 
Northern and Western nations of Europe as a stone edifice of 
any kind, — then I say, from this I conclude that these venera- 
ble Pillar Temples of Ireland are the strongest argument for 
the ancient civilization of our race (cheers). But this also 
explains the fact that St. Patrick, when he preached in Ireland, 
was not persecuted; that he was not contradicted,that it was 
not asked of him, as of every other man that ever preached the 
Gospel for the first time to any people, to shed his blood in 
proof of his belief. No; he came not to a barbarous people, — 
not to an uncivilized race; but he came to a wonderfully civil- 
ilzed nation, — a nation which though under the cloud of a false 
religion, had yet attained to establish laws and a recognized and 
settled form of government, a high philosophical knowledge, 
a splendid national melody and poetry; and her bards, and tho 
men who met St. Patrick upon the hill of Tara, when he moun- 
ted it on that Easter morning, were able to meet him with 
solid arguments; were able to meet him with the clash which 
takes place when mind meets mind; and when he had convin- 
ced them, they showed the greatest proof of their civilization 
by rising up on the instant to declare that Patrick's preaching 
was the truth, and that Patrick was a messenger of the true 
God (loud applause). We know for certain that, whatever 



114 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



was the origin of those Round Towers, the Church — the 
Catholic Church in Ireland — made use of them for religious 
purposes; that she built her Cathedrals and her Abbe\ 
Churches alongside of them; and we often find the loving 
group of the "Seven Churches" lying closely beside, if not 
under the shadow of the Round Towers (renewed applause). 
We also know that the monks of old set the Cross of Christ 
on these ancient Round Towers — that is, on the upper part of 
*hem and we know, from the evidence of a later day that, 
when the land was deluged in blood and when the faithful 
people were persecuted, hunted down — then it was usual, as 
in the olden time, to light a fire in the upper portion of those 
Round Towers, in order that the poor and persecuted might 
know where to find the sanctuary of God's altar (loud cheers). 
Thus it was that, no matter for what purpose they were 
founded, the Church of God made use of them for purposes 
of charity, of religion and of mercy. 

Coming down from these steep heights of history, — coming 
down like Moses from the mountain, — from out the mysteries 
that envelope the cradle of our race ; but, like the prophet 
of old, with the evidence of our nation's ancient civilization 
and renown beaming upon us, — we now come to the hill of 
Tara. Alas, the place where Ireland's monarch sat enthroned, 
the place where Ireland's sages and seers met, — where Ire- 
land's poets and bards filled the air with the rich harmony 
of our ancient Celtic melody, is now desolate ; not a stone 
upon a stone to attest its ancient glory, " Periemmt etiam 
ruinoe !" — the very ruins of it have perished. The mounds are 
there, the old moat is there, showing the circumvalation of 
the ancient towers of Tara ; — the old moat is there, still 
traced by the unbroken mound whereby the " Banquet Hall," 
three hundred and sixty feet long, by forty feet in width, 
was formed, and in which the kings of Ireland entertained 
their chieftains, their royal dames and their guests in high 
festival and glorious revelry. Beyond this no vestige 
remains. But there within the moat, — in the very midst of 
the ruins — there, perhaps, on the very spot where Ireland's 
ancient throne was raised, — there is a long, grass-grown 
mound ; the earth is raised ; — it is covered with a verdant 
sod ; the shamrock blooms upon it ; and the old peasants 
will tell you, this is the "Croppy's Grave." (cheers.) In 
the year 1798, the "year of the troubles," as we may well call 
it, some ninety Wexford men, or thereabouts, after the news 
came that " the cause was lost" fought their way every inch, 
from Wexford until they came to the hill of Tara, and made 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



115 



their last stand on the banks of the river Boyne. There, 
pursued by a great number of the King's Dragoons, they 
fought their way through these two miles of intervening 
country, their faces to the foe. These ninety heroes, sur- 
rounded, fired upon, still fought, and would not yield until 
slowly, like the Spartan band at Thermopylae, they gained 
the hill of Tara, and stood there like lions at bay (renewed 
cheers). Surrounded on all sides by the soldiers, the officers 
in command offered them their lives if they would only lay 
down their arms. One of these " Shelmaliers" had that 
morning sent the Colonel of the Dragoons to take a cold 
bath in the Boyne. In an evil hour the Wexford men, trust- 
ing to the plighted faith of this British officer, laid down 
their arms ; and, as soon as their guns were out of their 
hands, every man of them was fired upon ; and to the last 
one, they perished upon the hill of Tara. And there they 
were enshrined among the ancient glories of Ireland, and 
laid in the " Croppy's Grave" (renewed cheers). And they 
tell how, in 1843, when O'Connell was holding his monster 
meetings throughout the land, — in the early morning, he 
stood upon the hill of Tara, with a hundred thousand brave, 
strong Irishmen around him. There was a tent pitched upon 
the hill-top ; there was an altar erected, and an aged priest 
went to offer up the Mass for the people. But the old 
women, — the women with the grey heads, who were bloom- 
ing maidens in '98 — came from every side ; and they all knelt 
round the " Croppy's Grave ;" and just as the priest began 
the Mass, and the one hundred thousand on the hill-sides 
and in the vales below, were uniting in adoration, a loud cry 
of wailing pierced the air. It was the Irish mothers and the 
Irish maidens pouring out their souls in sorrow, and wetting 
with their tears the shamrocks that grew out of the " Croppy's 
Grave :" 

" Dark falls the tear of him that mourneth 
Lost hope or joy that never returneth: 
But brightly flows the tear 
Wept o'er a hero's bier " 

— (renewed cheers.) 

Tara and its glories are things of the past ; Tara and its 
monarchs are gone ; but the spirit that crowned them at 
Tara has not died with them (loud cheers) ; — the spirit that 
summoned bard and chief to surround their throne has not 
expired with them. That spirit was the spirit of Ireland's 
Nationality ; and that spirit lives to-day as strong, as fervid, 
and as glorious as ever ; it burned during the ages of perse- 



116 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



cntion ; as it ever lived in the hearts of the Irish race (tre 

mendous cheering, again and again renewed). 

And now, my friends, treading, as it were, adown the 
hill-side, after having heard Patrick's voice, after having 
beheld, on the threshold of Tara, Patrick's glorious epis- 
copal figure, as with the simplicity that designated his 
grand heroic character he plucked from the soil the sham- 
rock and upheld it, and appealed to the imagination of Ire- 
land — appealed to that imagination that never yet failed to 
recognize a thing of truth or a thing of beauty, — Ave now 
descend the hill, and wander through the land where we first 
beheld the group of the " Seven Churches." Everywhere 
throughout the land do we see the clustering ruins of these 
small churches. Rarely exceeding fifty feet in length, they 
rarely attain to any such proportion. There they are, gener- 
ally speaking, under the shadow of some old Round Tower, 
—some ancient Celtic name, indicative of past glory, still 
lingering around and sanctifying them. What were these 
seven churches? — what is the meaning of them — why were 
they so numerous ? Why. there were churches enough if we 
believe the ruins of Ireland, in Ireland during the first two 
centuries of its Christianity, to house the whole nation. 
Everywhere there were churches. — churches in groups of 
seven, — as if one were not enough, or two. Nowadays we 
are struck with the multitude of churches in London, in Dub- 
lin, in Xew York ; but we must remember that we are a 
divided community, and that every sect, no matter how small 
it is, builds its own church ; but in Ireland we were all of 
one faith ; and all of these churches were multiplied. Rut 
what is the meaning of it? These churches were built in the 
early days of Ireland's monasticism — in the days when the 
world acknowledged the miracle of Ireland's holiness. 
Xever since God created the earth — never since Christ pro- 
claimed the truth among men — never was seen so extraordin- 
ary and so miraculous a thing as that a people should 
become, almost entirely, a nation of monks and nuns, as soon 
as they became Catholic and Christian (cheers). The high- 
est proof of the Gospel is monasticism. As I stand before you 
robed in this Dominican dress — most unworthy to wear it — 
still, as I stand before you, a monk, vowed to God by poverty, 
chastity and obedience, — I claim for myself, such as I am, 
this glorious title, that the Church of God regards us as the 
very best of her children (cheers). And why ? Recause the 
cream, as it were, of the Gospel spirit is sacrifice, and 
the highest sacrifice is the sacrifice that gives a 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



117 



man entirely, without the slightest reserve, to God in the 
service of his country and of his fellow-men (loud cheers). 
This sacrifice is embodied and, as it were, combined in the 
monk ; and, therefore, the monk and the nun are really the 
highest productions of Christianity (renewed cheers). Now 
Ireland, in the very first days of her conversion, so 
quickly caught up the spirit and so throughly entered 
into the genius of the Gospel, that she became a nation of 
monks and nuns almost on the day when she became a nation 
of Christians. The consequence was that throughout the land 
— in the villages, in every little town, on every hill side, in 
every valley, — these holy monks were to be found; and they 
were called by the people, who loved them and venerated 
them so dearly — they were called by the name of Guldees, or 
servants of God. 

Then came, almost at the very moment of Ireland's 
conversion and Ireland's abundant monasticism, embod- 
ied, as it were, and sustained by that rule of St. Col- 
umbia which St. Patrick brought into Ireland, — having got 
it from St. Martin of Tours, — then came, at that very time, 
the ruin and desolation of almost all the rest of the world. 
Rome was in flames ; and the ancient Pagan civilization of 
thousands of years was gone. Hordes of barbarians poured 
in streams over the world. The whole of that formerly 
civilized world seemed to be falling back again into the 
darkness and chaos of the barbarism of the earliest times ; 
but Ireland, sheltered by the encircling waves, converted and 
sanctified, kept her national freedom. No invader profaned 
her virgin soil ; no sword was drawn, no cry of battle or 
feud resounded through the land ; and the consequence was, 
that Ireland, developing her schools, entering into every field 
of learning, produced in almost every monk a man fitted to 
teach his fellow-men and enlighten the world (cheers). And 
the whole world came to their monasteries, from every clime, 
as I have said before ; they filled the land ; and for three 
hundred years, without the shadow of a doubt, history 
declares that Ireland held the intellectual supremacy of the 
civilized world (renewed applause). Then were built those 
groups of seven churches, here and there ; then did they fill 
the land; then, when the morning sun arose, every valley in 
blessed Ireland resounded to the praises and the matin-song 
of the monk ; then the glorious cloisters of Lismore, of 
Armagh, of Bangor, of Arran arose; and, far out in the 
Western Ocean, the glorious chorus resounded in praise of 
God, and the musical genius of the people received its high- 



V 



118 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

est development in hymns and canticles of praise— the 
expression of their glorious faith (loud cheers). For three 
hundred years of peace and joy it lasted; and, during those 
three hundred years, Ireland sent forth a Columbia to lona ; 
a Virgilius to Italy; a Romauld to Brabant; a Gaul (or 
Gallus) to France ; — in a word, every nation in Europe, — even 
Rome itself, — all acknowledged that, in those days, the 
light of learning and of sanctity beamed upon them from the 
holy progeny of saints that Ireland, the fairest mother of 
saints, produced, and sent out to sanctify and enlighten the 
world (renewed cheers). And, mark you, my friends ; these 
Irish monks were fearless men. They were the most learned 
men in the world. For instance, there was one of them, — 
sL homfe he was called Fearghal, abroad he was called Vir- 
g'iiuSj — this man was a great astronomer; and, as early as 
the seventh century, he discovered the rotundity of the earth, 
proclaimed that it was a sphere, and declared the existence 
of the antipodes. In those days everybody thought that 
the earth was as flat as a pancake ; and the idea was, that a 
man could walk as far as the land brought him, and he would 
then drop into the sea ; and that if he took ship then, and 
sailed on to a certain point, why, then he would go into 
nothing at all (laughter). So, when this Irish monk, skilled 
in Irish science, wrote a book, and asserted this, which was 
recognized in after ages and proclaimed as a mighty dis- 
covery, the philosophers and learned men of the time were 
astonished. They thought it was heresy, and they did the 
most natural thing in the world — they complained to the 
Pope of him (laughter), and the Pope sent for him, examined 
him,— examined his theory and examined his astronomical 
system ; and this is the answer, and the best answer, I can 
give to those who say that the Catholic Church is not the 
friend of science or of progress. What do you think is the 
punishment the Pope gave him ? The Pope made him Arch- 
bishop of Salzburg. He told him to continue his discoveries 
— " continue your studies," he said ; " mind your prayers, and 
try and discover all the scientific truth that you can ; for you 
are a learned man" (laughter and cheers). Well, Fearghal 
continued his studies, and so well did he study that he antici- 
pated, by centuries, some of the most highly practical dis- 
coveries of modern ages ; and so well did he mind his 
prayers, that Pope Gregory the Tenth sanonized him after 
his death (cheers). 

The Danish invasion came, and I need not tell you that 
these Northern warriors who landed at the close of the eighth 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



US 



century, effecting their first landing near where the town of 
Skerries stands now, "between Dublin and Balbriggan, on the 
eastern coast — that these men thus coming, came as plun- 
derers and enemies of the religion as well as of the national- 
ity of the people. And for 300 years, wherever they came, 
and wherever they went, the first thing they did was to 
put to death all the monks, and all the nuns, set fire to the 
schools, and banish the students; and, inflamed in this way 
with the blood of the peaceful, they sought to kill all the 
Irish friars ; and a war of extermination, — a war of intermin- 
able struggle and duration, was carried on for three hundred 
years. Ireland fought them; the Irish kings and chieftains 
fought them. We read that in one battle alone, at Glenan- 
mada, in the county of Wicklow, King Malachi, he who wore 
the "collar of gold," and the great King Brian, joined 
their forces, in the cause of Ireland. In that grand day, 
when the morning sun arose, the battle began; audit was not 
until the sun set in the evening that the last Dane was swept 
from the field, and they withdrew to their ships, leaving six 
thousand dead bodies of their warriors, behind them (cheers). 
Thus did Ireland, united, know how to deal with her Danish 
invaders; thus would Ireland have dealt withFitzstephen and 
his Xormans; but on the day when they landed the curse of 
disunion and discord was among the people. Finally after 
three hundred years of invasion, Brian on that Good Friday 
of 1014, cast out the Danes for ever, and from the plains of 
Clontarf drove them into Dublin Bay. Well, behind them 
they left the ruins of all the religion they had found. They 
left a people who had, indeed, not lost their faith, but a peo- 
ple who were terribly shaken and demoralized by three hun- 
dred years of bloodshed and of war. One half of it — one 
sixth of it — would have been sufficient to ruin any other peo- 
ple; but the element that kept Ireland alive, — the element 
that kept the Irish nationality alive in the hearts of the 
people — the element that preserved civilization in spite of 
three centuries of war, was the element of Ireland's faith and 
the traditions of the nation's by-gone glory (cheers). 

And now we arrive at the year 1134. Thirty years 
before, in the year 1103, the last Danish army was conquered 
and routed on the shores of Strangford Lough, in the North, 
and the last Danish King took his departure forever from 
the green shores of Erin. Thirty years have elapsed. Ire- 
land is struggling to restore her shattered temples, her 
ruined altars, and to build up again, in all its former glory 
and sanctity, her nationality and monastic priesthood. 



120 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Then St. Malachi — great, glorious and venerable name !— St 
Malachi, in whom the best blood of Ireland's kings was min- 
gled with the best blood of Ireland's saints, — was Arch- 
bishop of Armagh. In the year 1134, he invited into Ire- 
land the Cistercian and the Benedictine Monks. They ivame 
with all the traditions of the most exalted sanctity — with a 
spirit not less mild nor less holy than the spirit of a Dominic 
or an Augustine, and built up the glories of Lindisfarne, of 
Iona, of Mellifont, of Monasterboice and of Monastereven, 
and all these magnificent ruins of which I spoke — the sacred 
monastic ruins of Ireland. Then the wondering world beheld 
such grand achievements as it never saw before, outrivalling 
in the splendor of their magnificence the grandeur of those 
temples which still attest the mediseval greatness of Belgium, 
of France and of Italy. Then did the Irish people see, 
enshrined in these houses, the holy solitaries and monks from 
Clairveaux, with the light of the great St. Bernard shining 
upon them from his grave. But only thirty years more 
passed — thirty years only ; and, behold, a trumpet is heard 
on the eastern coast of Ireland ; the shore and the hills of 
that Wexford coast re-echo to the shouts of the Norman, as 
he sets his accursed foot upon the soil of Erin. Divided as 
the nation was — chieftain fighting against chieftain, — for, 
when the great King Brian was slain at Clontarf. and his 
son and his grandson were killed, and the three generations 
of the royal family thus swept away — every strong man in 
the land stood up and put in his claim for the sovereignty ; — 
by this division the Anglo-Norman was able to fix himself 
in the land. Battles were fought on every hill in Ireland ; 
the most horrible scenes of the Danish invasion were renewed 
again. But Ireland is no longer able to shake the Saxon 
from her bosom ; for Ireland is no longer able to strike him 
as one man. The name of " United Irishmen " has been a 
name, and nothing but a name, since the day that Brian Boru 
was slain at Clontarf until this present moment. Would to 
God that this name of United Irishmen meant something 
more than an idle word ! Would to God that, again, to-day, 
we were all united for some great and glorious purpose ! — 
would to God that the blessing of our ancient, glorious unity 
was upon us! — would to God that the blessing even of a 
common purpose in the love of our country guided us ; then, 
indeed, would the Celtic race and the Celtic nation be as 
strong as ever it was — as strong as it was upon that evening 
at Clontarf which beheld Erin weeping over her martyred 
Brian, but beheld her with the crown still upon her brow. 







THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



121 



Sometimes victorious, yet oftener defeated, — defeated not 
bo much by the shock of the Norman onset, as by the treach- 
ery and the feuds of her own chieftains, — the heart of the 
nation was broken ; and behold, from the far sunny shores 
of Italy, there came to Ireland other monks and other mis- 
sionaries clothed in this very habit which I now wear, or in 
the sweet brown habit of St. Francis, or the glorious dress of 
St. Augustine. Unlike the monks who gave themselves up 
to contemplation, and who had large possessions, large houses 
— these men came among the people, to make themselves at 
home among the people, to become the " Soggarths Aroon" 
of Ireland (cheers). They came with a learning as great as 
that of the Irish monks of old, — with a sturdy devotion as ener- 
getic as that of Columbkille, or of Kevin, of Glendalough ; — 
they came with a message of peace, of consolation, and of 
hope to this heart-broken people ; and they came nearly seven 
hundred years ago to the Irish shores. The Irish people 
received them with a kind of supernatural instinct that they 
had found their champions and their priestly heroes ; and for 
nearly seven hundred years, the Franciscan and his Domini- 
can brother have dwelt together in the land (loud cheers). 
Instead of building up magnificent, wonderful edifices, like 
Holy Cross, or Mellifont, or Dunbrodie ; — instead of cover- 
ing acres with the grandeur of their buildings, these Domini- 
cans and Franciscans went out in small companies — ten, or 
twelve, or twenty ; — and they went into remote towns and 
villages ; and there they dwelt, and built quietly a convent 
for themselves ; and they educated the people themselves; 
and by-and-by, the people in the next generation learned to 
love the disciples of St. Dominic and St. Francis as they 
beheld the churches so multiplied. In every townland of Ire- 
land there was either a Dominican or a Franciscan church or 
convent. The priests of Ireland welcomed them ; — the holy 
Bishops of Ireland sustained them ; the ancient religions of 
Ireland gave them the right hand of friendship ; and the 
Cistercians or Benedictines gave them, very often, indeed, 
some of their own churches wherein to found their congrega 
tion, or to begin their missions. They came to dwell in the 
land early in the 12th century, — and until the 15th century, 
— strange to say, it was not yet found out what was the hid- 
den design of Providence in bringing them there, in what 
was once their own true and ancient missionary Ireland. 

During these three hundred years, the combat for Ireland's 
nationality was still continued. The O'Neil, the O'Brien, the 
O'Donnell, the McGuire, the O'More, kept the national sword 
6 



122 



THE CATHOLIC MJSSI025. 



waving in the air. The Franciscans and the Dominicans 
cheered them, entered into their feelings ; and they could 
only not be said to be more Irish than the Irish themselves, 
because they were the heart's blood of Ireland. They were 
the light of the national councils of the chieftains of Ireland, 
as their historians were the faithful annalists of the glories of 
these days of combat (cheers). They saw the trouble ; and 
yet- -for three hundred years the Franciscan and the Domini- 
can had not discovered what his real mission to Ireland was. 
But at the end of the three hundred years came the loth 
century. Then came the cloud of religious persecution over 
the land. All the hatred that divided the Saxon and the Celt, 
on the principle of nationality, was now heightened by the 
additional hatred of religious discord and division ; and Irish- 
men, if they hated the Saxon before, as the enemy of Ireland's 
nationality from the 15th century, hated him with an addi- 
tional hatred, as the enemy of Ireland's faith and Ireland's 
religion (cheers). The sword was drawn. My friends, I 
speak not in indignation but in sorrow ; and I know that if 
there be one amongst you, my fellow-countrymen, here to- 
night, — if there be a man who differs with me in religion, — to 
that man I say : " Brother and friend, you feel as deeply as I 
do a feeling of indignation and of regret for the religious per- 
secution of our native laud" (cheers). No man feels it more 
— no man regrets more bitterly the element of religious dis- 
cord, the terrible persecution of these three hundred years, 
through which Ireland — Catholic Ireland — has been obliged 
to pass, — no man feels this more than the high-minded, hon- 
est, kind-hearted Irish Protestant. (Loud cheers and a cry 
of " True ! ") And why should he not feel it ? If it was 
Catholic Ireland that had persecuted Protestant Ireland for 
that time, and with such intensity, I should hang my head 
for shame (renewed cheers). 

Well, that mild, scrupulous, old man, Henry the Eighth, — ■ 
(loud laughter) — in the middle of the fifteenth century got 
a scruple of conscience ! Perhaps it was while he was say- 
ing his prayers — he began to get uneasy and to be afraid 
that, may be, his wife wasn't his wife at all ! (laughter and 
applause). He wrote a letter to the Pope, and he said : " Holy 
Father, I am very uneasy in my mind !" The fact was, there 
was a very nice young lady in the court. Her name was Anna 
Boleyn. She was a great beauty. Henry got very fond of 
her; and he wanted to marry her. But he could not marry 
her because he was already a married man (laughter). So he 
wrote to the Pope, and he said he was uneasy in his mind — ■ 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



123 



he had a scruple of conscience; — and he had said, "Holy 
Father, grant me a favor. Grant me a divorce from Catherine 
of Arragon. I have been married to her for several years. 
She has had several children by me. Just grant me this lit- 
tle favor. I want a divorce ! " The Pope sent back word to 
him — " Don't be uneasy at all in your mind ! Stick to your 
wife like a man ; and don't be troubling me with your scru- 
ples" (laughter and cheers). Well, Henry threw the Pope 
over. He married the young woman while his former wife 
was living — and he should have been taken that very day and 
tried before the Lord Chief Justice of England, and trans- 
ported for life. And why ? Because if it had been any other 
man in England that did it but the King, that man would 
have been transported for life; — and the King is as much 
bound by the laws of God, and of Justice and conscience and 
morality as any other man (cheers). When Henry separated 
from the Pope, he made himself head of the Church; and he 
told the people of England that he would manage their con- 
sciences for them for the future. But when he called upon 
Ireland to join him in this strange, and indeed I think my 
Protestant friends will admit, insane act — for such, indeed, 
I think my Protestant friends will admit this act to be; for, I 
think it was nothing short of insanity for any man of sense 
to say " I will take the law of God as preached from the lips 
and illustrated in the life of Henry the Eighth," — Ireland 
refused. Henry drew the sword, and declared that Ireland 
should acknowledge him as the head of the Church, — that 
she should part with her ancient faith and with all the tradi- 
tions of her history to sustain him in his measures, — or that 
he would exterminate the Irish race. Another scruple of 
conscience came to this tender-hearted man! And what do 
you think it was ? " Oh," he said, " I am greatly afraid the 
friars and priests are not leading good lives" (laughter). So he 
set up what we call a " commission; " and he sent it to Ire- 
land to inquire what sort of lives the monks and friars and 
priests and nuns were leading; and the commissioners sent 
back word to him that they could not find any great fault 
with them; but that on the whole, they thought it would be 
better to turn them out ! So they took their convents and their 
churches, and whatever little property they possessed — ard 
these commissioners sold them and put the money into their 
pockets. There was a beautiful simplicity about the whole plan 
(applause and laughter). Well, my friends, then came the hour 
of the ruin of the dear old convents of the Franciscans and 
Dominicans. Their inmates were driven out at the point of 



124 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the sword; they were scattered like sheep over the land. 
Five pounds was the price set upon the head of the friar or 
priest, — the same price that was set upon the head of a wolf. 
They were hunted throughout the land; and when they fled 
for their lives from their convent homes, the Irish people 
opened their hearts, and said, " Come to the Soggarth Aroon" 
(loud applause). Throughout the length and breadth of the 
land they were scattered, with no shelter but the canopy of 
Heaven; with no Sunday sacrifice to remind the people of 
God; no Mass celebrated in public, and no Gospel preached 
and yet they succeeded for three hundred years in preserving 
the glorious Catholic faith that is as strong in Ireland to-day 
as ever it was (cheers). These venerable ruins tell the tale of 
the nation's woe, of the nation's sorrow. As long as it was 
merely a question of destroying a Cistercian or a Benedictine 
Abbey, there were so few of these in the land that the people 
did not feel it much. But when the persecution came upon 
the JZhreahir, as the friar was called, — the men whom every- 
body knew — the men whom everybody came to look up to for 
consolation in affliction or in sorrow; — when it came upon him 
— then it brought sorrow and affliction to every village, to 
every little town, — to every man in Ireland. There were, at 
this time upwards of eighty convents of religious — Francis- 
cans and Dominicans in Ireland, that numbered very close 
upon a thousand priests of each order. There were nearly a 
thousand Irish Franciscan, and nearly a thousand Irish Dom- 
inican priests, when Henry began his persecution. He was 
succeeded, after a brief interval of thirty years, by his daugh- 
ter Elizabeth. How many Dominicans, do you think, were 
then left in Ireland ? There were a thousand, you say ? Oh, 
God of Heaven ! there were only four of them left, — only four ! 
All the rest of these heroic men had stained their white habit 
with the blood that they shed for God and for their country 
(sensation). Twenty thousand men it took Elizabeth, for as 
many years as there was thousands of them, to try to plant 
the seedling of Protestantism on Irish soil. The ground was 
dug as for a grave; the seed of Protestantism was cast into 
that soil; and the blood of the nation was poured in, to warm 
it and to bring it forth. It never grew, — it never came forth; 
it never bloomed ! Ireland was as Catholic the day that Eliza- 
beth died at Hampton Court, gnawing the flesh off her hands 
in despair, and blaspheming God, — Ireland was as Catholic 
that day as she was the day that Henry the Eighth vainly 
commanded her first to become Protestant (cheers). 

Then came a utile breathing time, — a very short time,— 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



125 



and in fifty years there were six hundred Irish Dominican 
priests in Ireland again. They studied in Spain, in France, 
in Italy. These were the youth — the children of Irish 
fathers and mothers, who cheerfully gave them up, though 
they knew almost to a certainty that they were devoting 
them to a martyr's death ; but they gave them up for God. 
Smuggled out of the country, they studied in these foreign 
lands ; and they came back again, by night and by stealth, 
and they landed upon the shores of Ireland ; and when 
Cromwell came, he found six hundred Irish Dominicans 
upon the Irish land. Ten years after, — only ten years past, 
— and again the Irish Dominican preachers assembled to 
count up their numbers, and to tell how many survived and 
how many had fallen. How many do you think were left 
out of the six hundred? But one hundred and fifty were 
left ; four hundred and fifty had perished, — had shed their 
blood for their country, or had been shipped away to Barba- 
does as slaves. These are the tales their ruins tell. I need 
not speak of their noble martyrs. Oh, if these moss-grown 
stones of the Irish Franciscan and Dominican ruins could 
speak, they would tell how the people gave up everything 
they had, for years and years, as wave after wave of success- 
ive persecutions and confiscations and robbery rolled over 
them, — rather than renounce their glorious faith or their 
glorious priesthood (loud cheers). 

When Elizabeth died, the Irish Catholics thought her 
successor, James I, would give them at least leave to live ; 
and, accordingly, for a short time after he became king, 
James kept his own counsel, and he did not tell the Irish 
Catholics whether he would grant them any concessions or 
not ; but he must have given them some encouragement, for 
they befriended him, as they had always done to the House 
of Stuart. But what do you think the people did ? As 
soon as the notion that they would be allowed to live in the 
land took possession of them, and that they would be allowed 
to take possession of the estates they had been robbed of, — 
instead of minding themselves, the very first thing they did 
— to the credit of Irish fidelity be it said — was to set about 
restoring the Franciscan and Dominican abbeys (cheers). It 
was thus they restored the Black Abbey in Kilkenny, a 
a Dominican House ; they restored the Dominican 
Convent in Waterford, Multifaramham, in Westmeath, 
and others; and these in a few months grew up into 
all their former beauty from ruin, under the loving, faith- 
ful, restoring hands of the Irish people. But soon came 



126 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



a letter from the King ; and it began with these notable 
words : — "It has been told to us, that some of our Irish 
subjects imagined that we were about to grant them liberty 
of conscience." No such thing ! Liberty of conscience for 
Irish Catholics ! No ! Hordes of presecutors were let loose 
again, and the storms of persecution that burst over Ireland 
in the days of James I. were quite as bad, and as terrible as 
any that rained down blood upon the land in the days of 
Queen Elizabeth. And so, with varying fortunes, now of 
hope, and now of fear, this self-same game went on. The 
English determined that they would make one part of Ire- 
land, at least, Protestant, and that the fairest and the best 
portion of it, as they imagined, — namely, the province of 
Ulster. Now, mark the simple way they went about it. 
They made up their minds that they would make one pro- 
vince of Ireland Protestant, to begin with, in order that it 
might spread out by degrees to the others. And what did 
they do ? They gave notice to every Catholic in Ulster to 
pack up and be gone, — to leave the land. They confiscated 
every single acre in the fair province of Ulster ; and the 
Protestant Primate, the Archbishop of Armagh, — a very 
holy man, who was always preaching to the people not to be 
too fond of the things of this world, — he got 43,000 acres of 
the best land of these convents in fee. Trinity College, in 
Dublin, got 30,000 acres. There were certain guilds of tra- 
ders in London, — the "Skinners," "tanners," the "dry 
salvers ;" and what do you think these London Trade Asso- 
ciations got ? They got a present of two hundred and nine 
thousand eight hundred acres of the finest land in Ulster. 
Then all the rest of the province was given in lots of 1,000 
1,500 to 2,000 acres to Scotchmen and Englishmen. But the 
very deed that gave it obliged them to take their oath that 
they would accept that land upon this condition — not so 
much as to give a day's work to a laboring man, unless that 
laboring man took his oath that he was not a Catholic. And 
so Ulster was disposed of. That remained until Cromwell 
came ; — and when the second estimate was made of the 
kingdom it was discovered that there were nearly five mil- 
lions of acres lying still in the hands of the Catholics. And 
what did Cromwell do ? He quietly made a law, and he 
published it — and he said on the 1st of May, 1654, every 
Catholic in Ireland was to cross the Shannon, and to go into 
Connaught. Now, the river Shannon cuts off five of the 
Western counties from the rest of Ireland, and these five 
counties, though very large in extent, have more of waste 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



127 



land, of bog, and of hard, unproductive, stony soil than all 
the rest of Ireland. I am at liberty to say this, because I, 
myself, am the heart's blood of a Connaughtman (great 
cheering and laughter). If any other man said this of Con- 
naught, I would have to say my prayers, and keep a very 
sharp eye about me, to try to keep my temper (laughter). 
But it is quite true ; with all our love for our native land, 
with all my love for my native province, — all that love won't 
put a blade of grass on an acre of limestone ; and that there 
are acres of such, we all know. It was an acre of this sort 
that a poor fellow was building a wall around. " What are 
you building that wall for?" says the landlord. "Are you 
afraid the cattle will get out?" "No, your honor, indeed I 
am not," says the poor man ; " but I was afraid the poor 
brutes might get in !" (laughter). Then Cromwell sent the 
Catholics of Ireland to Connaught ; — and remember he gave 
them their choice ; he said, " Now, if you don't like to go to 
Connaught, I will send you to hell ! " (loud laughter). §o 
the Catholic Irish put their heads together, and they said : 
"It is better for us to go to Connaught ! He may want the 
other place for himself ! " (Great laughter and cheering.) 

God forbid that I should condemn any man to hell ; but 
I cannot help thinking of what the poor carman said to 
myself in Dublin once. Going along, he saw a likeness of 
Cromwell, and he says, " At all events Cromwell has gone to 
the devil ! " I said, " My man, don't be uncharitable. 
Don't say that ; it is uncharitable to say it." " Thunder and 
turf ! " says he, " sure if he is not gone to the devil, where is 
the use of having a devil at all ! " (Merriment and cheer- 
ing). At any rate, my friends, wherever he is gone to, he 
confiscated at one act five millions of acres of Irish land ; 
with one stroke of his pen, he handed over to his Cromwell- 
ian soldiers five million acres of the best land in Ireland, the 
Golden Vale of Tipperary included. Forty years later, the 
Catholics began to creep out of Connaught, and to buy little 
lots here and there, and they got a few lots here and there, 
given to them by their Protestant friends. But, at any rate, 
it was discovered by the Government of England that the 
Catholics in Ireland were beginning to get a little bit of the 
land again — and they issued another Commission to inquire 
into the titles to these properties, and they found that there 
was a million two hundred thousand acres of the land recur- 
red to the Catholics — and they found, also, that that land 
belonged to the Crown ; and the million two hundred thous- 
and acres were again confiscated. So that, as soon as the 



128 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



people began to take hold of the land at all, down came the 
sword of persecution and of confiscation upon them. And 
Cromwell himself avowed with the greatest solemnity, that 
as Ireland would not become Protestant, Ireland should be 
destroyed. Now, is it to excite your feelings of hatred 
against England that I say these things ? No, no ! I don't 
want any man to hate his neighbor. I don't want to excite 
these feelings. Nor I don't believe it is necessary for me t*> 
excite them (laughter and loud cheers). I believe sincerely 
I believe — that an effort to excite an Irishman to a dislike of 
England, would be something like an effort to encourage a 
cat to take a mouse (cheers). I mention these facts first 
because these are the things that Ireland's ruins tell us; 
because these are at once the history of the weakness and 
the sadness, yet of the strength and of the glory of which 
these ruins tell us. I mention these things because they are 
matter of history ; and because, though we are the party 
that were on the ground, prostrate, there is nothing in the 
history of our fathers at which the Irishmen of to-day need 
be ashamed, or hang his head (loud cheers). But if you 
want to know in what spirit our people dealt with all this 
persecution — if you want to know how we met those who 
were thus terrible in their persecution of us, I appeal to the 
history of my country, and I will state to you three great 
facts that will show you what was the glorious spirit of the 
Irish people, even in the midst of their sorrows ; — how Chris- 
tian it was and how patient it was ; — how forgiving and how 
loving even to our persecutors it was ; — how grandly they 
illustrated the spirit of duty at the command of their Lord 
and Saviour , and how magnificently they returned good for 
evil. The first of these facts is this : At the time that 
England invaded Ireland, — towards the close of the twelfth 
century, — there were a number of Englishmen in slavery in 
Ireland. They were taken prisoners of • war ; they had come 
over with the Danes, — from Wales and from North Britain 
with their Danish superiors ; and when Ireland conquered 
them, the rude, terrible custom of the times, and the shocks 
that all peaceful spirit had got by these wars, had bred so 
much ferocity in the people, that they actually made slaves 
of these Englishmen ! And they were everywhere in the 
land. When the English landed in Ireland, and when the 
Sist Irish blood was shed by them, the nation assembled hf 
its bishops and archbishops in the synod at Armagh, there 
said, " Perhaps the Almighty God is angry with us because 
we have these captive Christians and Saxons among us, and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



12$ 



punishes us for having these slaves among us. In the name 
of God we will set them free." And on that day every soul 
in Ireland that was in slavery, received his freedom (loud 
cheers). Oh, what a grand and glorious sight before 
Heaven ! — a nation fit to be free yet enslaved — yet with the 
very hand on which others try to fasten their chains, striking 
off the chains from these English slaves ! Never was there 
a more glorious illustration of the Heavenly influence of 
Christianity since Christianity was preached among the 
nations. The next incident is rather a ludicrous one, and I 
am afraid that it will make you laugh. My friends, I know 
the English people well. Some of the best friends that I 
ha ve in the world are in England. They have a great many 
fine qualities. But there is a secret, quiet, passive contempt 
for Ireland — and I really believe it exists among the very 
best of them, with very few exceptions. An Englishman 
will not, as a gerferal rule, hate an Irishman joined to him in 
faith ; but he will quietly despise us. If we rise and become 
fractious, then, perhaps, he will fear us ; but, generally 
speaking, in the English heart there is, no doubt, a contempt 
for Ireland and for Irishmen. Now, that showed itself 
remarkably in 1666. In that year the Catholics of Ireland 
were ground into the very dust. That year saw one hundred 
thousand Irishmen — six thousand of them beautiful boys- 
sent off to be sold as slaves in the sugar plantations of Bar- 
badoes. That year London was burned, just as Chicago was 
burned the other day. The people were left in misery. 
The Catholics of Ireland, — hunted persecuted, scarcely able 
to live, — actually came together, and, out of pure charity 
they made up for the famishing people of London a present 
— a grand present. They sent them over fifteen thousand 
fat bullocks ! They knew John Bull's taste for beef (laugh- 
ter). They knew his liking for a good beef-steak, and they 
actually sent him the best beef in the world — Irish beef 
(laughter). The bullocks arrived in London. The people 
took them, slaughtered them and ate them — and the Irish 
Catholics said, " Much good may they do you " (laughter) ! 
Now comes the funny part of it. When the bullocks were 
all killed and eaten, the people of London got up a petition to 
the Houses of Parliament and they got Parliament to act on 
that petition ; it was to the effect that this importation of 
Irish oxen was a nuisance ; and it should be abated (cheers ' 
and laughter). But they had taken good care to eat the 
meat before they voted it a nuisance (laughter). 

The third great instance of Ireland's magnanimous 



130 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Christianity, and of the magnanimity with which this brave 
and grand old people knew how to return good for evil, 
was in the time of King James. In the year 1689, exactly 
twenty years after the Irish bullocks had been voted a nui- 
sance in London — in that year there happened to be, for a 
short time, a Catholic King in England. The tables were 
turned. The King went to work and he turned out the Irish 
Lord Chancellor because he was a Protestant, and he put in 
a Catholic Chancellor in his place. He turned out two Irish 
judges because they were Protestants, and he put in two 
Englishmen, Catholics, as judges in their place. He did 
various actions of this kind, persecuting men because 
they were Protestants and he was a Catholic. And, now, 
mark! We have it on the evidence of history that the 
Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and the Catholic Pope of 
Rome wrote to James the Second, through the Lord Lieu- 
tenant over the Irish Catholics there, that he had no right to 
do that — and that it was very wrong (loud cheers). Oh, 
what a contrast ! When Charles the First wished to grant 
some little remission of the persecution in Ireland, because 
he was in want of money, the Irish Catholics sent him word 
that they would give him two hundred thousand pounds if 
he would only give them leave to worship God as their own 
consciences directed. What encouragement the King gave 
them we know not ; at any rate, they sent him a sum of a 
hundred and fifty thousand pounds, by way of instalment. 
But the moment it became rumored abroad, the Protestant 
Archbishop of Dublin got up in the pulpit of St. Patrick's 
Cathedral, and he declared that a curse would fall upon the 
land and upon the King, because of these anticipated con- 
cessions to the Catholics. What a contrast is here presented 
between the action of the Catholic people of Ireland and the 
action of their oppressors ! And in these instances have we 
not presented to us the strongest evidence that the people 
who can act so by their enemies were incapable of being 
crushed ! Yes ; Ireland can never be crushed nor conquered 
Ireland can never lose her nationality so long as she retains 
so high and so glorious a faith, and presents so magnificent 
an illustration of it in her national life. Never ! She has 
not lost it ? She has it to-day. She will have it in the 
higher and a more perfect form of complete and entire 
national freedom ; — for God does not abandon a race who 
not only cling to Him with an unchanging faith, but who 
also know how, in the midst of their sufferings, to illustrate 
that Faith by so glorious, so liberal, so grand a spirit of 
Christian charity (loud cheers). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



131 



And now, my friends, it is for me simply to draw one 
conclusion, and to have done. Is there a man among us 
here to-night who is ashamed of his race or his native land 
if that man have the high honor to be an Irishman ? Is there a 
man living that can point to a more glorious and a pure source 
whence he draws the blood in his veins than the man who 
can point to the bravery of his Irish forefathers or the immac- 
ulate purity of his Irish mother (loud cheers) ? We glory in 
them and we glory the faith for which our ancestors have died. 
We glory in the love of country that never, — never, — for an 
instant, — admitted that Ireland was a mere province, — that 
Ireland was merely a " West Britain. " (Renewed cheers.) 
Never in our darkest hour was that idea adapted to the Irish 
mind, or adopted by the will of the Irish people (cheers). And 
therefore, I say if we glory in that faith — if we glory in the his- 
tory of their national conduct and of their national love, oh, my 
friends and fellow-countrymen— I say it as well as a priest as an 
Irishman — let us emulate their example; let us learn to be gen- 
erous to those who differ from us — and let us learn to be chari- 
table even to those who would fain injure us (cheers). We can 
thus conquer them. We can thus assure to the future of Ire- 
land the blessings that have been denied to her past, — the 
blessing of religious equality, the blessing of religious liberty, 
the blessing of religious unity, which one day or other will 
spring up in Ireland again (tremendous cheering). I have 
often heard words of bitterness, aye, and of insult, addressed 
to myself in the North of Ireland, coming from Orange lips, 
but I have always said to myself, he is an Irishman; though 
he is an Orangeman, he is an Irishman. If he lives long 
enough he will learn to love the priest that represents Ireland's 
old faith ; but if he die in his Orange dispositions, his son or his 
grandson will yet shake hands with and bless the priest, when 
he and I are both in our graves (loud cheers). And why do 
I say this ? Because nothing bad, nothing uncharitable, noth- 
ing harsh or venomous ever yet lasted long upon the green 
soil of Ireland. If you throw a poisonous snake into the 
grass of Ireland he will be sweetened, so as to lose his poison. 
— or else he will die (loud cheers). Even the English people- 
when they landed were not two hundred and fifty years in the 
Unci until they were part of it: the very Normans who inva- 
ded us became "more Irish than the Irish themselves." They 
became so fond of the country, that they were thoroughly 
imbued with its spirit. And so any evil that we have in Ire- 
land is only a temporary and a passing evil, if we are only 
faithful to our traditions and to the history of our country 



132 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



To-day there is religious disunion; but, thanks be to 
God, I have lived to see religious disabilities destroyed. 
[Cries of " here, here," and cheers.] And if I were now in the 
position of addressing Irish Orangemen, I would say, "Men 
of Erin, three cheers for the Church disestablishment ! " 
[Great cheering.] And if they should ask me, " Why ? " I 
would answer: " It was right and proper to disestablish the 
Church because the 4 Established Church' was put in be- 
tween you and me, and we ought to love each other for we 
are both Irish ! " [Applause.] 



by this disestablishment; and the honest Protestant man will 
begin to know a little more of his Catholic brother, and to 
admire him; and the Catholic will begin to know a little 
more of the Orangeman, and, perhaps, to say : " After all 
he is not half so bad as he appears" (laughter and cheers). 
And believe me, my friends, that, breathing the air of Ire- 
land, which is Catholic, eating the bread made out of the 
wheat which grows out on Irish soil, — they get so infused 
with Catholic blood that, as soon as the Orangeman begins 
to have the slightest regard or love for his Catholic fellow- 
countryman he is on the highway to become a Catholic ; — for 
a Catholic he will be sometime or other. As a man said to 
me very emphatically once, " They will all be Catholics one 
day, surely, sir, if they only stay long enough in the coun- 
try ! " I say, my friends, that the past is the best guarantee 
for the future. We have seen the past in some of its glories. 
What is the future to be? What is the future that is yet to 
dawn on this dearly loved land of ours ? Oh, how glorious 
will that future be, when all Irishmen shall be united in one 
common faith and one common love ? Oh, how fair will our 
beloved Erin be when, clothed in religious unity, religious 
equality, and freedom, she shall rise out of the ocean wave, 
as fair, as lovely, in the end of time as she was in the glorious 
days when the world, entranced by her beauty, proclaimed 
her to be the Mother of Saints and Sages (loud cheers). 
Yes ; I see her rising emancipated ; no trace of blood or 
persecution on her virgin face — the crown so long lost to hei;. 
resting again upon her fair brow ! I see her in peace and 
concord with all the nations around her, and with her own 
children within her. I see her venerated by the nations afar 
off, and, most of all, by the mighty nation which, in that 
day, in its strength, and in its youth, and in its vigor, shall 
sway the destinies of the world (great cheering). I see her 
as Columbia salutes her across the ocean waves. But the 




closer to the other 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



133 



light of freedom coming from around my mother's face will 
reflect the light of freedom coming from the face of that 
nation which has been nursed in freedom, cradled in freedom, 
and which has never violated the sacred principles of relig 
ious freedom and religious equality (vehement cheering). 
I see her with the light of faith shining upon her face, 
and I see her revered, beloved and cherished by the nations 
as an ancient and a most precious thing. I behold her 
rising in the energy of a second birth, when nations that 
have held their heads high are humbled in the dust ! 
And so I hail thee, O mother Erin ! and I say to thee — 

" The nations have fallen, but thou still art young ; 

Thy sun is but rising when others have set, 

And though slavery's clouds round thy morning have hung, 

The full noon of Freedom shall beam round thee yet ! " 

(Great cheering, amid which the Rev. lecturer retired.) 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon delivered on Sunday afternoon, April 7th, by the Rev. 
Father Burke, in the Chapel of the " Xavier Alumni Sodality," 
attached to the Church and College of St. Francis Xavier, Fifteenth 
Street, New York 1 



"the peace of god." 



" Now when it was late that same day, being the first day of the 
week and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered to- 
gether, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came, and stood in the midst, and 
said to them : Peace be to you. * * * * The disciples, therefore, were 
glad when they saw the Lord, and He said to them again : ' Peace be 
to you.' Now, Thomas, the son of Didymus, was not with them. * * * 
Jesus came and stood in the midst of them and said: "Peace be to 
,you ! "—John 20 : 19-31. 

This mode of salutation was adopted by our Divine Lord 
after his resurrection and not before. Invariably, for the forty 
days that He remained with His own, after He had risen unto 
His glory, He saluted them with the words "Peace be to 



134 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



you," as He had said elsewhere, " My peace I leave unto you 
My peace I give unto you.'' After His resurrection, I say 
He said these words. Before His passion He could scarcely 
say them with truth ; for up to the moment that He sent forth 
His last cry upon the Cross, — saving us, — there was war 
between God and man ; and how could the Son of God say, 
" peace be to you? " But now, when He has reconciled all in 
Himself — omnia reconcilavit et in semet ipso pacem faciens, 
— creating peace — that which He Himself produced, He gave 
to His Apostles in the words which I have just read for 

you. 

And now, my dear friends, let us consider what is that 
peace of which our Saviour speaks — what is that peace which 
He declares to be the inheritance of the elect, — the great leg- 
acy that He left to the world. — "the peace of God that sur- 
passeth all understanding." In what does it consist ? Do we 
know the meaning — the very definition — of it ? It is a sim- 
ple word, and familiar to us, is this word peace ; but I venture 
to say that it is one of those simple words that men do not 
take the trouble to seek to interpret or to understand. In 
order, then, that we may understand what is this "peace of 
God which surpasseth all understanding," and in order that 
in our understanding of it, by the light of faith, we may dis- 
cover our own mission as Christian men, I ask you to con- 
sider what the mission of the Divine Son of God was, when 
He came and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin 
Mary and was made man. YYnat did He come for ? What 
work did He have to do ? I answer in the language of Scrip- 
ture : " He came to effect many works of peace and reconcili- 
ation." In the day that man sinned and rebelled against God, 
he declared war against the Almighty : and God took up the 
challenge, and declared war against sinners. This war invol- 
ved separation between God and man ; and in this state of 
warfare did Christ our Lord find the world. He found the 
world separated from God first of all by error and ignorance. 
" There is no truth and there is no knowledge of God in 
the land," was the complaint of the Prophet Isaiah. " Truth 
is diminished among the children of men," exclaimed, with 
sorrow, the royal Psalmist ; " nowhere is God known." 

Before the Son of God came upon the earth, the nations 
had wandered away into a thousand forms of idolatry and 
of error. Every man called his own form of error by the 
name of " Religion." Some were " epicureans ; " — sensual- 
ists, — beasts — were made gods by them. They canonized 
the principle of impurity, and they called it by the name of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



135 



a goddess ; and they declared that this was their religion I 
Others there were, brutalized in mind, who worshipped their 
own passions of strife ; and they canonized the principle of 
revenge and of bloodshed, and they worshipped it under the 
name of Mars. This thing went so far that even thieves, rob- 
bers, the dishonest, had their own god ; — and the principle 
of dishonesty and of thievery was canonized, or, rather, dei- 
fied, and called religion, and embodied under the name cf 
the god Mercury ! It is a trick of the devil, — and it is a 
trick of the world, — to take up some form of error — some 
form of unbelief — and to call that " Religion." When He 
came that was " the way, the truth, and the life," there was 
darkness over the whole earth. The world was " civilized " 
enough. Arts and sciences flourished. It was the " Augus- 
tan Era," which has given a name to the very highest civil- 
ization among the nations, from that day to this. But what 
was the awful want of their civilization. They ignored God ; 
they took no account of God in their knowledge. They 
thought they could be wise without God. God nullified 
their wisdom, and abandoned them to a reprobate sense ! 
Thus did mankind declare war against the God of Truth and 
of Wisdom. What followed from this ? Another kind of 
war, more terrible, if you will, — the effect — the natural and 
necessary effect — of that separation of the human intellect 
from God. What was this ? Every form of sin — nay, the 
vilest, the filthiest, the most abominable sin — was found 
among men. ISTot as an exception ; not as a thing to be 
hidden, but as a thing to be acknowledged, as a matter of 
course. The husband was not faithful to the wife, nor the 
wife to the husband. Juvenal tells us that in that flourishing 
society of paganism, as a man saw his wife growing old — 
and, accordingly, as the bloom of her youth passed away 
from her, — he began to despise her, until, in the words of 
the satirist, the day came when she saw a fair, blooming 
maiden come into the house, and herself, the mother of chil- 
dren, summoned to go out ; because her eyes had lost their 
lustre, and her features the roses and the lilies of beauty ; 
and a stranger was there to take her place. There was no 
principle of fidelity. There was no principle of honesty. 
jSTo man could trust his fellow-man. Xo man knew who was 
to be trusted. Even the ancient, rugged virtues that the 
early Republics of Greece and Rome produced, had passed 
away. The world was over-civilized for them. They were 
the rough forms, with some semblance of that virtue upon 
them that the rugged half-civilized man possessed, and were 



136 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



utterly laughed at, and scorned, and scoffed at by the civil- 
ized pagan, who was the very embodiment of sensuality and 
impurity. 

Thus did the world declare war against God, and for sen- 
suality. The God of Purity, — they knew Him not, — and, 
therefore, they could not believe in Him. " There is no 
truth, and there is no knowledge of God in the land," says 
the prophet. Then, he immediately adds : " Cursing, lying, 
theft, and adultery have overthrown and blotted out much 
love — because my people, saith the Lord, have no grace." 

The second kind of war which our Lord found upon the 
earth was the war between men: for they who had ceased to 
know God, had ceased to love or respect one another. Split 
up into a multitude of sects, — nation against nation, pro- 
vince, against province, the very history of our race was noth- 
ing but a history of war and strife, and bloodshed. Then 
came the Son of God Incarnate, with healing hand and power- 
ful touch, to restore the world, and to renew the face of our 
earth. How did He do this? It could only be done by 
Him, and by Him could it be only done by His instituting, 
and leaving, and declaring the truth of God, Himself — and 
leaving it in the midst of men; the unchangable truth, the 
eternal truth, the pure unmixed bright light of truth as it 
beamed forth from the eternal wisdom of God. It was only 
thus that He could restore mankind to peace with the God 
of eternal truth. Then it was necessary that having thus 
established the truth, He should wipe out the sin, by the 
shedding of His own blood, as a victim, and that He should 
leave behind Him, for over in the world, the running stream 
of that sanctifying blood unto the cleansing of the sinner and 
the unclean, — unto the strengthening of the weak, unto the 
encouraging of the strong, unto the revivifying of the dead. 
Did Christ do this ? Yes, He lifted up His voice and spoke, 
and the voice of the Saviour was the voice of the eternal God. 
And mark, that before He saved the world by the shedding of 
His blood, before He redeemed the sin, for three long years, 
night and day, in and out of season, He was preaching 
and teaching; dispelling error, letting in the light; for 
mankind would not be prepared for redemption except through 
the light and through the truth of God. Wherefore we find 
Him, now on the mountain side, now on the lake; now among 
the Pharisees, now in the desert; now in the temple of Jeru- 
salem, now in the by-ways of Judea; now in the little towns 
and villages — but everywhere — " quotidie docens," teaching 
every day; for three years preparing the world for its redemp* 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



137 



tion; reconciling the human intelligence with the light of God's 
truth ; opening up the minds, and letting the stream of pure 
light from God into the intellect. Then, when the three years 
preparation were over, then when men began to understand 
what the truth was — then when He had formed His disciples, 
and established His Apostolic College: — then, did the eternal 
Victim go upon the Cross, and pour out His blood; and the 
shedding of that blood washed away the sin of the world — 
and left open those streams from His sacred wounds that were 
to flow through the sacramental channels, and that were to 
find every human soul with all its spiritual wants, here, there 
and everywhere, until the end of time, — according to that 
promise relating to the Church of the Lord; " You shall 
draw waters of joy, from the fountains of sorrow!" He 
purified the world by the shedding of His blood. But, well 
did he know our nature. " Et naturam nostram ipse cognovit." 
He made us, and he knew us. Well did He know that the 
stream that he poured forth from His wounds on Calvary 
should flow for ever, because the sins which that blood alone 
could wipe away would be renewed, and renewed again, as 
long as mankind should be upon that earth. " For," — and He 
said it with sorrowing voice — " it needs must be that scandal 
cometh." 

Thus in the Divine Truth and the sacramental grace 
which He gave, did He reconcile mankind to His Heavenly 
Father, and restore peace between God and man. Then, 
touching the other great warfare, He proclaimed the principle 
of universal charity — declared that no injuries, no insult, 
must obstruct it, or break it, or destroy it — declared that we 
must do good for evil, — declared that we must live for man ; 
take an interest in all men, try to gain the souls of all men ; 
and that this love, this fraternity, this charity, must reign in 
our hearts at the very same time that we are upholding, with 
every power of our mind — and, if necessary, of our body, 
the sacred principles of Divine truth, and of Divine grace. 

Behold, then, my dear friends, the peace that passeth all 
understanding ; the peaoe that He came to leave and to give. 
Peace means union. When nations are at war, they are 
separated from each other into two hostile camps, and they 
look upon each other with scowling eyes of hatred and 
anger; — and when the war is over, they come forth — tley 
meet — and they join hands in peace. So, the meeting of the 
intellect of man with the truth of God — the admission of 
that divine truth into the mind — the opening of the heart to 
the admission of the grace of God, and of our Lord Himself 



138 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



by the sacraments, establishes the meeting of peace between 
God and man. The charity of which I have spoken — the 
nobleness of Christian forgiveness, which is the complement 
of Christian humility — the grandeur of Christian patience 
and forbearance — establishes peace among all mankind. It 
was the design of Christ that that eternal peace of which I 
speak should also be represented by unity — that all men 
should be one by the unity of thought in one common faith, 
by the unity of heart in one common charity. And it is 
"worthy of remark that just as our Lord saluted His Apostles 
with the words: " My peace be with you" — -after His resur- 
rection — so, before His Passion — on the night before He 
suffered — He put up His prayer to God — and over and over 
again, to the Father in Heaven — that all men might be one, 
even as He and the Father were one. " Father," Pie says, 
" Keep them one, even as thou and I are one." That is to 
say a union of faith — a recognition of one undivided and 
unchanging truth, — a bowing down of all before one idea — 
and then, a union of hearts springing from that union of 
faith. This was the design of Christ, and for this He labored. 
And this the Church has labored to effect. For this she has 
labored two thousand years. She has succeeded, in a great 
measure, in doing it; — but the work has been upset and 
destroyed in many lands by the hands of those who were 
the enemies of God in spoiling and breaking up the fair 
design of our Lord and Saviour. 

Now, in this eternal and immutable truth preached to all 
men — recognized by all men — gathering in every intelli- 
gence — respecting all honest deviations — yet uniting all in 
faith — in this truth and in this sanctifying peace which is in 
the Catholic Church, lies the salvation of the world — the sal- 
vation of society — the salvation of every principle which 
forms this highly-commended and often-praised civilization 
of ours. The moment we step one inch out of the Catholic 
Church and look around us, what do we find ? Is there any 
agency on earth, — even though it may call itself a religion, — 
that will answer the purposes of society ? Is there any of 
these sects- — or religions, as they call themselves, that can 
make a man pure? No. They are unable to probe and 
sound the depths of the human heart. They do not pretend 
to legislate for purity of thought. Practically, they reduce 
the idea of purity to a mere saving of appearances before the 
world, — to a mere external respect and decorum. Are they 
able to shake a man out of his sins ? No ; there is no real- 
ity about them. They have no tribunal of conscience, even, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



139 



to which they oblige a man to come, after careful self-exam- 
ination. They have no standard of judgment to put before 
him. They have no agency, divinely appointed, to crush a 
man, — to humble a man, — to break the pride in him, — to 
make him confess and avow his sin, — and then, lifting the 
sacramental hand over him, by reason of his humility, his 
sorrow, and his confession — to send him forth renewed and 
converted by the grace of God. There is no such thing. 
There is nothing so calculated to enable a man to keep his 
word faithfully. ~No. The first principle of fidelity — lying 
at the root of all society — the great fundamental principle 
of fidelity — is the sacrament which makes the sanctity of 
marriage, — by which those whom it unites are sealed with 
the seal of God and sanctified with the truth of God's church. 
The man is saved from the treachery of his own passions. 
The woman is saved from the inconstancy of the heart of 
man. The family is saved in the assertion of the mother's 
rights, — in the placing on her head a crown that no hand on 
earth can touch or take away. The future of the world is 
saved by ennobling the Christian woman and wife, and 
mother, with something of the purity of the Virgin Mother 
of God ? Do they do this ? Oh, feel the heart within me 
indignant, — the blood almost boiling in my veins when I 
think of it ! — when I see under the shadow of the crucified, 
nineteen hundred years after He had sanctified the world, — 
when I see men deliberately rooting up the very foundations 
of society — loosening the key-stone in the arch, and pulling 
it down, in the day when they went back to their paganism 
— in the day when they threatened that the bond that God 
had tied should be unloosed by the hands of men, — in the 
day when they gave the lie to the Lord Himself, who 
declared — " What God hath joined let no man separate," — 
in the day when man is so flung out into his own tempta- 
tions ; and the women, no matter who she may be, — crowned 
queen or lowly peasant; the first or the last in the land, — 
ig waiting in trepidation, not knowing the hour when, upon 
some infamous accusation, the writ of divorce may be put 
into her hand, and the mother of children be ordered to go 
forth, that her place may be given to another ! 

Is their any agency to make men honest? No ; they can- 
not do it. A man plunders to-day ; steals with privy hand ; 
enriches himself unlawfully, unjustly, shamefully — and to- 
morrow he goes to some revival, or some camp meeting, and 
there he blesses the Lord in a loud voice, proclaiming to his 
admiring friends that " he has found the Lord ! " But is there 



140 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



any agency to stop him, and say : " Hold my friend, wait for 
a moment ! Have you made restitution to the last farthing 
for what you unjustly acquired ? Have you shaken out that 
Judas purse of yours, until the last dime — the very last piece 
of silver for which you sold your soul to hell, has gone back 
again to those from whom it was taken ? If not, speak not 
of finding Christ ! — speak not of leaning upon the Lord ! 
Blaspheme not the God of Justice !" Is there any agency 
outside of the Catholic Church to sift a man like this ? Is 
there any such agency at all ? Xo : we live in an age of 
shams — of pretences ; and the worst shams of all — the vilest — 
the foulest pretences of all — are those we find in the so-called 
" religious world." Take up your religious newspapers — take 
up your religions publications outside of the Catholic Church ! 
I protest it is more than common sense or human patience 
can hear ! If the great Church of the living God were not in 
the midst of you, unchanging in truth — ever faithful in every 
commission — clothed in the freshness of her first sanctity, and 
sanctifying all who come within her sacramental influence — if 
she were not here as the city of God, this so-called " religious 
world" would bring down the wrath of God, — calculated, as 
its antics are, to bring the Lord, Himself, into contempt, ex- 
citing the pity of angels, the anger of heaven, and the joy of 
hell. 

A recent writer who has devoted some attention to the 
consideration of the question of religious indifference asks — 
" Why are the churches empty ? How is that the intellec- 
tual men of the day don't like to listen to sermons ? How is 
it that they take no interest in the things of the Church ? 
How is it that they have no belief? " And a wise voice — a 
pious voice — answers : " Because, my friend, you do not know 
how to preach to them. If you want to captivate the intel- 
lect of the men of our day ; — if you want to warp them, — if 
you want to convince them — don't be clinging to antiquated 
traditions ; — don't rest upon these so-called doctrines of a 
by-gone time. Read scientific books. Find there the pro- 
blems that are bursting up continually from modem science, 
and try to reconcile your ideas of religion with those ; — and 
then preach them ! Then will you show yourself a man of 
the age — a man of progress ! " And so, henceforth, the sub- 
ject matter of our sermons is to be electric telegraphs, sub- 
marine cables, and flying ships. " If you want to learn how 
most effectively to preach," adds this wise and able voice, 
" read the latest novels, and try to learn from them all the 
bye-ways and highways of the human heart." See how deli- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



141 



cately they follow all the chit-chat of society, — all the little 
gossipings, and love-makings and the thousand-and-one influ- 
ences that act upon the adulterous and depraved heart of man 
— the wicked passions of man. This is the text from which 
the preacher of to-day is to preach if he wishes to attract the 
intellect of the world. And all this in the very sight, and under 
the shadow of the Cross of Christ, who died for man ! Was 
ever blasphemy so terrible ? And this is what is c ailed 
" religion " by the world. Not a word about Divine truth — 
not a word about Divine grace ! In one of the leading jour- 
nals of New York — an able paper — a well written paper — in 
a leading article of that paper this very morning, I read a 
long dissertation on this very question of preaching and 
preachers ; — and the word " truth " appeared only once in 
that article — and then it came in under the title of "scien- 
tific truth." The word " grace " did not occur even once. 
But never, even once, did simple " truth " occur — or even 
"religious truth," flash across the mind of the able, temper- 
ate-minded judicious man that wrote it ! And I don't blame 
him, — for he was writing for the age! He was giving a 
very fair idea of what the world is, and what the world is 
sure to come to, if the Almighty God, in His mercy, does not 
touch the hearts of men, and give them enough of sense to 
turn to the Catholic Church and hear the voice of God — the 
Divine spouse of Christ in her teachings. Without this voice 
they cannot hear the voice of God. Without her teaching, 
this hardened, dried-up heart of man will never grow into 
purity of love. 

Now we come to the mission that you and I have. Grand 
as is the vision that rises before our eyes when we con- 
template the heavenly beauty and graces of our great and 
mighty Mother, the Church, who has never told a lie nor ever 
compromised or kept back the least portion of the eternal and 
saving truth which mankind should know ; and who has never 
tolerated the slightest sin, but to king and peasant has said 
alike, " be pure, be faithful, or I will cut you off as a rotten 
branch and cast you into hell," — grand I say as is the spectacle 
of this glorious Church, — wonderful and convincing as are her 
claims to every man's faith and every man's obedience, — if the 
advocacy of their claims were left to me, and to such as I am 
and to the Fathers, the world would scarcely ever be conven- 
ed. You have your mission, my dear young friends, children 
of the Church of God; you have your mission, — not as 
preachers indeed ; yet, far more eloquent than the voice of 
any preacher, in the silent force of example, — the example 



142 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



that you must give to those around you, forcing the most 
unwilling and reluctant to look upon you and to see in you 
shining forth the glories of your divine religion. " Sit lux 
luceat omni mundo" He did not say to all, " Go and 
preach": only to the twelve. But to all of them He said, 
" let your light shine before men, that they may see your 
work and that they may give glory to God, who is in Heaven." 
And so I say to you, let your light shine calmly but brightly : 
that all men may see you, and thus give glory to your Mother 
the Church, triumphant in Heaven, and militant for you on 
earth. It is your mission to avow bravely, manfully, — how- 
ever temperately, yet firm as the adamantine rock, — every 
sacred principle of Catholicity, and every iota of the teach- 
ing of that Church, when she teaches a law; because her des- 
tiny is to be the embodiment of truth in this world. " With 
the heart we believe unto justice." But that is not enough ; 
with the mouth we must make loud confession unto salvation: 
— loud confession ! Why ? Because the devil is making a 
loud act of his faith, filling the world with it, bringing it out 
everywhere, in books in newspapers, in speeches, in associa- 
tions, in schools, in the public academies, in the universities, 
in the halls of medicine, and of law ; in the courts, in the 
senate, — it is the one cry — the harsh, grating cry by which 
the devil makes his act of detestable faith in himself, and de- 
nial of God ; — an act of faith, — an act of diabolical faith that 
meets us at every turn — strikes and offends every sense 
of ours with its terrible language. We cannot take up a 
book that, if we do not find a satyr peering out from its pages 
it is the bald, stark, daub of some fool, who flings his smut or 
his infidelity into the sight of God. We cannot turn to a 
public journal that is not a record of plundering, of villany, 
of robbery, and murders and thefts and defalcations. Why, 
what would a dictionary of this day of ours look like ? It 
would be filled with modern names, — page after page, — for 
these modern sins of which our honest forefathers scarcely 
knew anything: — these sins, the embodiment of the practical 
immorality of the apostate monk of Wurtemburg. We must 
oppose this terrible exhibition of evil which the devil makes 
in our public streets and throughout every organ that comes 
before us, not only by the strong assertion of our holy faith, 
but by the silent and eloquent example of our purity of life 
our uprightness and cleanliness of heart. And therefore it is 
that in truth, never perhaps before was the Word of the Lord 
60 well fulfilled in the children of the Catholic Church, as to- 
day, when he said, " You are the salt of the earth." And so 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



143 



they are the salt of the earth throughout the world. How 
much more in this great country, where we are, as it were, in 
the spring-time only breaking up the ground and throwing 
in the seed from which one-hundred-fold the fruit will come 
when we are lying in our cold forgotten graves. The seed- 
ings that we sow to-day, of Catholic faith, of Catholic purity, 
of Catholic truth, will grow up into a fruit and an abundance 
so grand, so magnificent, that, perhaps it is given to us that 
the ultimate glory of the Church of God shall be the work 
of our hands and of our lives to-day. It is a great thing to 
live in the spring-time of a nation ; it is a great thing to find 
oneself at the fountain head of a stream of mighty national 
existence that will swell with every age, gaining momentum 
as it rolls on with the flood of time. It is a great thing 
to lie at the fountain-head of that stream. It is said, with 
truth — 

" The pebble on the streamlet's brink 

Has changed the course of many a river ; 
The dew-drop on the acorn-leaf 
May warp the giant oak forever." 

The river of America's nationality and the existence is 
only beginning to flow to-day, and we should endeavor to 
direct it into the current of Catholicity. The young oak 
which is planted to-day, and which will, in all probability, 
over-shadow and overspread the whole earth, was but lately 
hidden in the acron-cup. Ah, let us remember, that even a 
pebble in the hand of the youth, David, hurled against 
Goliah, struck down the giant. Let us be the pebble in the 
hand of God that shall strike down this demon — this proud, 
presumptuous demon of infidelity that has entered into the 
land and taking, " seizing," the whole Continent of America, 
says " this soil must be mine." Let us be as the pebble in 
the mountain brook, which turns the stream that will one 
day be a mighty river, into the great bed of Catholic truth 
and Catholic purity that alone can save this land. Let us 
be as the dew-drop on the acorn leaf — the dew-drop of 
Catholic faith, of Catholic intelligence, .and Catholic mor- 
ality ; the tear, as it were, flowing from the pitying eye of 
the Saviour, upon the young sprouting oak of human exis- 
tence, training it towards heaven — sending it to heaven in 
the national aspiration, in the national action, and not per- 
mitting it to be dragged and warped, in this way and that 3 
until it Iks a stunted and misbegotten plant, clinging to the 



144 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



earth, into which it will fling its leaves — its trunk stunted and 
withered, conveying no sap but the sap of religious bigotry 
and intolerance, and the bitterest juices of foolish sectarian- 
ism, of absurd, blind folly, exciting the laughter of all sensi- 
ble men upon the earth, the indignation of God, and the joy 
of hell. This is our mission. Say, will you fulfill it ? Say, 
Oh Catholic young men, will you fulfill it? You cannot 
fulfill it without being thorough-going Catholics ; you can- 
not fulfill it without being joined heart and soul with the 
Church, through the Church's head — through the immu- 
table rock — the supreme governor — the infallible teacher of 
God's infallible Church ; you cannot fulfill this mission until 
you join with that rivalry of Christian self-denial — the rivalry 
of Christian purity, and a holy horror of everything hollow 
and pretentious — a holy horror of shams. There are no 
shams in the Catholic Church ; there is nothing but shams 
— religious shams — outside of her. You cannot fulfill this 
mission unless you seek to sanctify your hearts and your 
lives, and to sweeten those lives by prayer, by confession, 
and communion ; and I congratulate you, that in facing 
this mission, which lies before every Catholic man, — you do 
it, not as individuals, but as a body, as an organization. 
We live in an age of organizations. There is nothing every- 
where but organizations, for this thing, or for that ; and 
Christ our Lord should have His. It is fitting that the 
Church should have hers. You are banded together in 
the name of our Lord and Saviour. 

You remember that in the Gospel of last Sunday the 
Evangelist tells us — " These things are written that all men 
may believe that the Lord Jesus is Christ — the Son of God ; 
and that, believing, they may have life in His name." In His 
name you are assembled together, bound by common hopes, by 
a common purpose, which, without interfering at all with your 
daily duties or your individual liberty, still binds you together 
in a unity of thought, of opinion, and of purpose, to act on 
this great mass of society, in which our mission lies — yours 
and mine, — mine in the Word, mine in labor, mine in undi- 
vided thought, for that and nothing but that, — or else I also 
would be a sham ; — yours in the manner of which I have 
spoken to you. And you are banded together under the 
guidance of these religious men whom the Church honors by 
permitting them to take the glorious name of Jesus as their 
own ; — of these men who, for three hundred years, have led 
the van of the Holy Catholic Church in that mighty warfare 
that is going on, which makes the Church a militant church ; 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



145 



— of these men whose fathers before them — the Saints — » 
received first every blow that was intended to strike at the 
heart of the Church ; — of these men who are known 
among the religious Orders of the Church, and represent the 
Saviour in His risen glory ; for they rose again at the com- 
mand of the Sovereign Pontiff; — of these men whose name 
is known in every land, — loved with the ardor of Catholic 
love ; hated and detested with the first and most intense 
hatred of every man that hates the glorious and immaculate 
Church of Christ ; — of these men who, for three hundred 
years, have trained and led the young intellect of Christen- 
dom — have stamped upon every young heart, that ever came 
under their hands, the sacred name and the sacred love 
which is their own title and their most glorious crown. And, 
therefore I congratulate you with hope, — and a high and 
well-assured hope, — that all that God intends, all that the 
Church expects at your hands, in this glorious Missionary 
Society, — that — all — that — you will give to God and to His 
Church so as to enable Him to repay you ten thousand fold, 
in glory, in the Kingdom of His everlasting joy ! 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered in the Church of St. Charles Borromeo, bj 
the Rev. Father Burke.] 

" THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE SALVATION OF SOCIETY." 



My Friends : The subject which, as you know, has been 
announced to you, and which I purpose to treat before you 
this evening, is the proposition that " The Catholic Church 
is the Salvation of Society." Perhaps there are some among 
you who think I am an unwontedly courageous man to 
make so wild and so rash an assertion. But it must bo 
acknowledged, indeed, that, for the past eighteen hundred 
years that the Catholic Church has existed, society nas 
always endeavored to get away from her grasp and to live 
without her. People who admit the action of the Church, 
who allow it to influence their history, who let it influence 
their lives- -if they rise to the height of their Christian ele» 
1 



146 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



vation, if they conform themselves to the teachings of what 
is true, if they avail themselves of the graces of the Church 
— they are very often scoffed at and called a priest-ridden 
and besotted people. Nowadays, it is the fashion to look 
upon that man as the best of his class who has succeeded the 
most completely in emancipating himself from every control 
of religion, or of the Catholic Church. In one sense, it is a 
great advantage to a man to have no religion, — to shake off 
the influence of the Church. Such a man remains without a 
conscience and without much mind. He saves himself from 
those moments of uneasiness and remorse that come to most 
men until they completely lose all reverence for God : and 
the consequence is that, if he is a sinner, and in the way of 
sin, he enjoys it all the more ; and he can make the more 
use of his time in every pathway of iniquity, until lie has no 
obstacles of conscience or of religion to fetter him. So far, 
it is an advantage to be without religion. The robber, for 
instance, can rob more confidently if he can manage to forget 
that there is a God above him. The murderer can wash his 
hands, no matter how deeply he stains them, — if there is no 
condemning record, no accusing voice, no ear to hear the 
voice of the blood that cries out against him for satisfaction. 
He can pursue his misdeeds all the more at his own ease. 
And, so, for this, among many other reasons, the world is 
oonstantly trying to emancipate itself from the dominion of 
God, and from the control of the Church — the messenger of 
the Saviour of the world. It would seem, therefore, at first 
sight, rather a hazardous thing to stand up in the face of the 
world, and in the face of society to-day — this boasted society 
— and say to them : " You cannot live — you cannot get on 
without the Catholic Church ! She can do without you ! A 
coterie here ! A tribe there ! A nation elsewhere ! A 
race beyond ! She can do without you. But you, at your 
peril, must let her in, because you cannot do without her ! " 
Now, this is the pith and substance of all that I intend to 
say to you here to-night ; but not to say it without proof ; 
for I do not ask any man here to accept one iota of what I 
say, on my mere assertion, until I have proved it. 

My proposition, as you perceive, is that the Catholic 
Church is the Salvation of Society — and it involves three 
distinct propositions, although it may appear to you to be 
only one : First, it involves the proposition that society 
requires to be saved, — and then that it requires something 
for its salvation. Then, it involves the proposition that the 
Catholic Church, so far, has been the salvation of the world 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



147 



in times past ; — out of which grows the third proposition 
consequently, she is necessary to the world in all future 
times ; and it is her destiny to be, in time to come, what she 
has been in time past — the salvation of society. These are 
three distinct propositions. 

The man who admires this century of ours and who 
serenely glories in it — who calls it " the Age of Progress" 
— the " Age of Enlightenment ;" — who speaks of his own 
land, — be it Ireland or America, or Italy or France, — as a 
country of enlightenment, and its people as an enlightened 
people, — this man stands amazed when I say to him that 
this boasted society requires salvation. Somebody or other 
must save it. For, consider what he has done ? What has 
it produced without the saving influence of the Catholic 
Church ? We may analyze society, as I intend to view it, 
from an intellectual stand-point. Then we shall see the 
society of learning, — the society of art and of literature. 
Or we may view it from a moral stand-point, — that is to say, 
in the government of the world, and how the wheels of 
society work in this boasted progress of ours, — emancipated 
from the Catholic Church, as this society has been mainly 
for the last three hundred years ; in some countries more, 
in some countries less, in some countries entirely. Now, I 
ask you, what has this society produced, intellectually, 
morally, politically ? Intellectually, it has produced a phil- 
osophy that asks us, at this hour of the day, to believe in 
ghosts. The last climax of the philosophy of this nineteenth 
century of ours is "Spiritualism," of which you have all 
heard. The philosophy of to-day, unlike even the philoso- 
pher of the Pagan times of old, does not direct his studies, 
nor the labors of his mind, to the investigation of the truth 
and of the development of the hidden secrets of nature — of 
the harmonies of the soul of man — of the wants of the spirit 
of man. To none of these does the philosopher of to-day 
direct his attention. But this man, — this leader of mind in 
society, — gets a lot of his friends round a table ; and there 
they sit and listen until " the spirits" begin to knock ; that 
is the pith and substance of his philosophy. Another man — 
(one of another great school, and, indeed, these two schools 
may be said to have divided the philosophical empire of our 
age,) — this disciple of another school that sends up its tele- 
grams into our churches and pulpits, says : " Oh, man ! 
man of the children of men, — since thou hast received a 
commission to sound the Scriptures — to mend the " Word 
of God," as it is called, — believe me when I tell you that our 



148 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



common ancestor was an ape — and that it was by the 
merest accident, — the accident of progression ; eating a 
certain kind of food ; keeping certain hours ; endeavoring, 
"by degrees, to walk er«ct instead of crawling on our hands 
and feet, — it was by the merest accident, — a congeries of 
accidental circumstances, — that we have not tails ! " This is 
the philosophy of the nineteenth century. This is the intel- 
lectual grandeur and " Progress of the Age" that says : " I 
don't require salvation ! " 

The moral progress of this society, which has emanci- 
pated itself from the Catholic Church, — what is it ? [t has 
produced in this^ our society, sins, of which, as a priest and a 
man, I am ashamed to speak. It has produced in this City 
of New York the terrible insult to a crucified Lord, — that a 
woman, pretending to be modest, should have chosen Good 
Friday night to advocate impurity ! Just as the intellectual 
development of our society, emancipated from the Church, 
has arrived at the glorious discovery of " Spiritualism," so 
the immoral development of this age of ours has arrived at 
the deep depth of "free love." 

What is the political spirit of society, and the perfection 
to which it has attained since it has been emancipated from 
the Church ? Why, it has produced the " politician" of our 
days. It has produced the ruler who imagines that he is set 
up, throughout all the nations, only to grasp, — -justly, if he 
can, unjustly, if he has no other means, — every privilege of 
power and of absolutism. It has produced in the people an 
unwillingness to obey even just laws. I need not tell you ; 
you have the evidence of your own senses ; you have records 
of the daily actions of the world laid before you every morn- 
ing. This is the issue of the dominant spirit of society, when 
society emancipates itself from the Church, and, by so doing, 
endeavors to shake off God. Now we come to the great ques- 
tion : quis medicabit ? Who shall touch society with a scien- 
tific and healing hand ? What virtue can we infuse into it ? 
That must come, I assert, from God, and from Him alone, of 
whom the Scriptures say that " He makes a healthy people" 
(facit populam sanabilem) ; that He has made our nature so 
that, even in its worst infirmity, it is capable of cure. He 
came and fovmd it in its worst infirmity ; society rotten to its 
heart's core ; and the interior rottenness — the obscurity of 
the intellect — the corruption of the heart — manifesting itself 
in the actions and sins of which St. Paul, the Apostle, says, 
" JVec memorabilia in nobis" — that they must not be even 
mentioned among Christian men. Christ, the Son of God, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



140 



because He was God — equal to the Father — girding Himself 
up to the mighty work of healing this society, came down 
from Heaven and cured it, when no other hand but His could 
have touched it with healing ; when no other virtue or power 
save His could, at all, have given life to the dead world, 
purity to the corrupt world, light to the darkened intellect 01 
man. From Him came life to the dead — and that life was 
light to the darkened and strength to the weak, — because He 
was God. 

Then the nations of Greece and Rome appeared in the 
strength of their power, — proud in their mental culture, — 
proud in the grandeur of their civilization — and contemptu- 
ously put away and despised the message of the Divine Faith 
which was sent to them, and for three hundred long years 
persecuted the Church of God. This great instructress, who 
came to talk in a language that they knew not, and to teach 
them things that they never heard of — both the things of 
Heaven and the things of earth — this great instructress, for 
three hundred years, lay hid in the caves and catacombs of 
the earth, afraid to show her face ; for the whole world — all 
the power of Pagan Greece and Rome — was raised against 
her. There was blood upon her virgin face. There was 
blood upon her unspotted hands — the blood of the innocent 
and of the pure ; and all the world knew of Christianity was 
the strong testimony which, from time to time, was given of 
it, by youth and maiden, in the arena of Rome, or in the 
amphitheatres of Antioch or of Corinth. Then, in punish- 
ment for their pride, — as an act of vengeance upon them for 
their rejection of His gospel — the Almighty God resolved to 
break up their ancient civilization ; to sweep away their 
power; to bring the hordes of barbarous nations from the 
North of Europe into the very heart of Rome, the centre of 
the world's empire, and to crush and destroy it with fire arid 
sword, and utterly to break up all that society which was 
formed, of old, upon the literature and the philosophy of 
Greece and of Rome. Consequently, we behold, in the fifth 
century, all the ancient civilization completely destroyed, 
and the world reduced again almost to the chaos of barbar- 
ism from which the Pagans of old had withdrawn it. Arts 
and sciences perished, when the Goth and Vandal, Visigoth, 
and Ostrogoth, and Hun swept down, fury in their eyes, 
swords in their hands ; — swept down with naked bodies, bar- 
barous language and fierce determination, like a swarm of 
locusts, over the old Roman Empire, and all the lands sub- 
ject to Roman sway. A man who called himself tha 



150 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



" Scourge of God," Alaric, was at the head of his Yis igoths, 
He was swooping over Koine. He was asked to spare the 
city out of respect to the civilization of the world and the 
tombs of the Apostles ! " I cannot withhold," exclaimed 
the Visigoth, "I cannot withhold. I hear within me a mys- 
terious voice which says : ' Alaric ! Alaric ! On ! on to 
Rome !' " And so he came and sacked the city, burned 
and destroyed its temples, and its palaces, and its libraries, 
and its glories of painting and sculptures — hurled them all 
into the dust? And the desolation spread world-wide 
wherever a vestige of ancient civilization was found, until, 
at the end of that fatal century, the Church of God found 
herself standing upon the ruins of a world that had passed 
away. Before her were the countless hordes of the savage 
children of the North, out of which rugged material it was 
her destiny and her office to form the society of modern 
times. Hard, indeed, was the task which she undertook — 
not only to evangelize them — to teach them the things of 
God, but, also to teach them the beauties of human art and 
human science — to soften them with the genial influences 
and the tender appliances of learning ; — to gain their hearts 
and soften their souls, and mollify their manners and refine 
them by every human appliance as well as by every Divine 
influence. For this task did she gather herself up. She, in 
that day, collected with a careful and with a venerating 
hand all that remained out of the ruin of ancient literature, 
of ancient poetry, of ancient history, in the languages of 
Greece and of Rome. She gathered them lovingly and care- 
fully to her bosom. She laid them up in her sacred recesses, 
— in her cloisters. She applied, diligently, to the study of 
them, and to the diffusion of them, the minds of the holiest 
and best of her consecrated children ; until, in a few years 
all that the world had of refinement, of learning, of all that 
was refining and gentle, was all concentrated in the person of 
the lowly monk, who, full of the lore of Greece and Rome — 
full of the ancient learning as well as of that of the time, — an 
artist — a painter — a musician — a man of letters — and cover- 
ing all with the humility of his profession, and hiding all in 
the cloister, yet treasured all up for the society that was to 
come after him, and for the honor and glory of God and of 
His Church. And so, by degrees, the Church was enabled to 
found schools — and, then, colleges, — and thence to form, 
gradually, universities — and to obtain for them and to insure 
unto them civic and municipal rights, as we shall see farther 
on. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



151 



By degrees she founded the great mediaeval universities, 
gathering together all those who wished to learn, and sending 
forth from her cloisters, her Benedictines, and Cistercians, her 
Dominicans, her Franciscans to teach philosophy and theclogy 
while they illustrated the very highest art in the beauty of 
their paintings and the splendor which they threw around the 
Christian sciences. Universities were founded by her into 
which she gathered the youth of various nations; and then 
sending them home, among their rude and rugged fellow- 
citizens, she spread gradually the flame of human knowledge 
as well as the fire of divine faith and sanctity; and thus, for 
many a long century did the Church labor assiduously, lovingly, 
perseveringly, and so secured unto us whatever blessings of 
learning we possess to-day. It is worthy of remark that in this 
way she saved society for the time, by drawing forth its rude 
chaotic elements, and by her patient action in creating the 
light of knowledge where the darkness of ignorance was be- 
fore, — with patient and persevering effort bringing forth, 
order out of disorder — until her influence over the world was 
like the word of God, when upon the first day of creation 
He made all things, and made them to exist where nothing 
but void and darkness was before. Nor can the history of 
by-gone times be disputed in this ; nor can any man allege 
that I am claiming too much for the Catholic Church when I 
say that she alone has presented to us all the splendor of the 
Pagan literature of the ancient times, — all the arts and sci- 
ences ; that she alone has founded the great schools and univer- 
sities of Christendom, and of the civilized world — even in 
Protestant countries to-day; — nay, more, that nearly all the 
great scholars who shone as stars in the firmament of learn- 
ing were her children, — either consecrated to her in the priest- 
hood, or attached to her by the strongest and the tenderest 
bonds of faith. Lest my word in this matter be considered 
exaggerated, let me read for you a passage which this very 
day struck me — the testimony of a Protestant writer — to what 
I say. He says to us : 

"If the Catholic Church had done nothing more than to 
preserve for us, by painful solicitude and unrewarded toil, the 
precepts and intellectual treasures of Greece and Rome, she 
would have been entitled to our everlasting gratitude. But 
her hierarchy did not merely preserve these treasures. They 
taught the modern world how to use them. We can never 
forget that at least nine out of every ten of all the great col- 
leges and universities in Christendom were founded by monks 
or pi iests, bishops or arch-bishops. This is true of the most 



152 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



famous institutions in Protestant as well as in Catholic coun 
tries. And equally undeniable is the fact that the greatest 
discoveries in the sciences and in the arts (with the sole 
exception of Sir Isaac Newton) have been made either by 
Catholics or by those who were educated by them. Our 
readers know that Copernicus, the author of our present sys- 
tem of astronomy, lived and died a poor parish priest, in an 
obscure village ; and Galileo lived and died a Catholic. The 
great Kepler, although a Protestant himself, always acknowl- 
edged that he received the most valuable part of his educa- 
tion from the monks and priests. It were easy to add to 
these illustrious names many equally renowned in other 
departments of science, as well as literature and the arts, 
including those of statesmen, orators, historians, poets and 
artists." 

This is the testimony of a Protestant writer, confirmed by 
the voice of history, to which I fearlessly appeal, when I lay 
down the proposition that if intellectual darkness — if the 
barbarism of ignorance be a disease in society, then history 
proves that the Catholic Church has been the salvation of 
society in the cure of that disease. I might go deeper here. 
I might show you here in the beautiful reasoning of the great 
St. Thomas Aquinas how, in the Catholic Church alone, is 
the solid basis of all intellectual knowledge. " For," observes 
the saint, " every science, no matter how different it may be 
from others, — every science rests upon certain principles thai 
are taken for granted — certain axioms that are accepted^ 
without being proved — taken upon authority — taken upon 
the light of reasoning — believing in the reasoning itself upoir 
the recognition of that knowledge. Now," he goes on to 
say, " the principle of acknowledged certainty of some kind 
or other lies at the base and at the foundation of every science, 
and of every form of intellectual power." But, in the sci 
ences and in the intellectual world, Ave find the same order 
the same exquisite harmony, which, in the works of God, we 
find in the material and physical creation. The principle, 
therefore, of all the arts and sciences, each with its respective 
power, is that all go up in regular order from the lowest form 
of art to the highest of human sciences, — astronomy, — until 
they touch divine theology, which teaches of God and of the 
things of God. Upon the certainty of that First Science de- 
pends the very idea of " certainty," upon which every other 
science is based. And, therefore, the key-note of all knowl- 
edge is found in the science of divine theology, which teaches 
of God. Now, outside of the Catholic Church there is r 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



153 



theology — as a science ; because science involves certain 
knowledge — and there is no certain knowledge of divine 
things outside the Catholic Church. There is no certain 
knowledge of Divine things where truth is said to be in the 
inquiry after truth, as in Protestantism, where religion is 
reduced from the principle of immutable faith to the mere 
result of reasoning, amounting to a strong opinion. There is 
no certainty, therefore, outside of that Church that speaks of 
God in the very language of God ; that gives a message sent 
from the very lips of God ; that puts that message into the 
God-like form of immutable dogma before the minds of His 
children, and so starts them in the pursuit of all human know- 
ledge, with the certain light of divinely revealed truth, and 
with the principle of certain, deeply-seated certitude in- 
their minds. 

Now, we pass from the intellectual view of society to the 
moral view of it. In order to understand the action of the 
Church here as the sole salvation of society, I must ask you 
to consider the dangers which threaten society in its moral 
aspect. These dangers are the following — First of all, the 
libertinism, the instability, the inconstancy and the impurity 
of man. Secondly, the absence of the element of holiness 
and sanctity in the education of childhood. Thirdly the sense 
of irresponsibility, or a personal liberty which not only pas 
ses us over from under the control of law, but cuts off our 
communication with God, and makes us forget that we are 
responsible to God for every action of our lives ; and so, 
gradually brings a man to believe that Liberty and Freedom 
mean licentiousness and impurity. These I hold to be the 
three great evils that threaten society. The inconstancy of 
man, for man is fickle in his friendship, is unstable in his love ; 
is inconstant in his affections, subject to a thousand passing 
sensations, — his soul laid open to appeals from every sense — 
to the ebb and flow of every pulse and every sense of his for 
ever palpitating with a quick response, telling the eye to look 
with pleasure upon this object, as amusing; to the ear, telling 
it to drink in with pleasure such and such a sound of melody; 
— and so on. Need I tell you, my friends, what your own 
heart has so often iold you? How inconstant we are ; how 
the thing that captivates us to-day, we will look coldly upon 
to-morrow, and the next day, perhaps with eyes of disgust ? 
Need I tell you how fickle is that love, that friendship of the 
human heart, against which, and its inconstancy, the Holy 
Ghost seems to warn us. " Put not thy trust in Princes, nor 
n the children of men, in whom there is no salvation." To 



154 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIONS". 



guard against this inconstancy it is necessary to call m divine 
grace and help from Heaven. For it is a question of conform- 
ing the heart of man in the steadiness, in the unchangeable- 
ness, and in the purity of the love that is to last all his life 
long. Therefore it is that the Catholic Church sanctifies the 
solemn contract by which man promises to Ms fellow-creature 
that he will love her; that he will never allow that love for 
her to grow cold in his bosom that he will never allow even a 
thought of any other love than hers to cross his pure imagin- 
ation or his pure soul that he will love her in the days of her 
old age as he loves her, to-day in the freshness of her beauty 
as she stands by his side before the altar of God, and puts her 
virgin hand into Ms. And she swears to him a corresponding 
love. But ah ! who can assure to her that the heart which 
promises to be hers to day — who can insure to her that the 
love, ever inconstant in its own nature, and acted upon by a 
thousand influences — is not calculated, first to deceive, then to 
alienate, then to destroy? How can she have the courage to 
believe that the word that passed from that man's lips, at that 
altar, shall never be regretted — never be repealed ? I answer, 
the Catholic Church comes in and calls down a special sac- 
ramental grace from Heaven ; lets in the very body of the 
Saviour, in its sacramental form, to touch these two hearts, 
and by purifying them, to elevate their affection into some- 
thing more than gross love of sense, and to shed upon those 
two hearts, thus united, the rays of divine grace, to tinge 
their lives somewhat with the light of ineffable love that binds 
the Lord to His Church. And so, in that sacrament of matri- 
mony the Church provides a divine remedy for the inconstancy 
of the heart of man ; and she also provides a sanctifying influ- 
ence which, lying at the very fountainhead, and source, and 
spring of our nature, sanctifies the whole stream of society 
that flows from the sacramental and sanctifying love of Chris- 
tian marriage. 

Do you not know that tMs society, in separating itself 
from the Church, has literally destroyed itself? If Protes- 
tantism, or TTmtarianism, or any other form of error did 
nothing else than simply to remove from the sacrament of 
Matrimony its sacramental character — its sanctifying char 
acter, — by that very act, that error of religious unbelief, it 
destroys society. The man who destroys, in the least degree, 
the firmness of the bond that can never be broken, because it 
is bound by the hand of God, and sealed with the sacra- 
mental seal, — the man that touches that bond, the man that 
takes from that sacrament one single iota of its grace, makes 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



155 



himself thereby the enemy of society, and pollutes the very 
fountain-ht ad from which the stream of our life comes. 
When, as the prophet of old, came into the city of Jericho, 
they snowed him the stream that ran by the city walls ; and 
they told him : [< ¥ow, here is a stream of water : whoever 
drinks of that water dies ; our people are dying either of 
thiist or of the poisoned waters.'' He did not attempt to 
heal the stream as it flowed thereby ; but he took to himself 
salt, and he blessed that salt, and he said to the people — 
'•bring me to the fountain out of which this river cometh." 
And they brought him up into the mountain ; and they 
showed him the fountain-head of the stream. "Here/' he 
says, ; ' here must we heal it." He put the blessed salt into 
the fountain, the spring from which the stream came, and he 
said : *• Now, I have healed these waters, and there shall be 
no more death in them." Thus, he purified the fountain- 
head of the spring of waters of Jericho. Such is the sacra- 
ment of marriage to human society. The future of the 
world, the moral future of mankind — of the rising genera- 
tions, all depend upon the purity and the sanctity of the 
matrimonial tie. There does the Church of God throw, as it 
were, hei sacramental salt into the fountain-head of our 
nature, and so sanctifies the humanity that springs from its 
source. 

The next great moral influence of society which requires 
the Church's action, is Education. "The child," as you 
know, " is father to the man ; " and what the child is to day 
the man will be in twenty or thirty years time. Xow, the 
young soul of the child is like the earth in the growing sea- 
son. It is the time of sowing, and of planting. TThatever 
is put into that young heart in the early days of childhood, 
will bring up. in the summer of manhood, and in the autumn 
of old age, its crop, either of good or of evil And, therefore, 
it is the most important time of life. The future of the 
world depends upon the sanctity of education. Xow, in 
order that education may be bad, it is not necessary, my 
friends, to teach the child anything bad. In order to make 
education bad it is quite enough to neglect the element of 
sanctity and of religion. It is quite enough to neglect the 
religious portion of the education. By that very defect the 
education becomes bad. And why ? Because such is our 
nature, such the infirmity of our fallen state, — such is the 
atmosphere of the scenes in which we live in this world — 
such the power of the infernal agencies that are busily at 
work for our destruction, that, educate the child as carefully 



156 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



as you may, surround him with the holiest influences, fill him 
with the choicest graces, you still run great risks that, some 
day or other, the serpent of sin will gain an entrance into 
that young soul, in spite of you. How much more if that 
young heart be not replenished with divine grace ! How 
much more if that young soul be not fenced round by a thou- 
sand appliances and a thousand defences against its enemies ! 
And thus do we see that the principle of bad education is 
established the moment the strong religious element ia 
removed. Hence it is that, out of the sanctity of marriage 
springs the sanctity of education in the Catholic Church. 
And why ? Because the Church of God proclaims that the 
marriage bond no man can dissolve ; that that marriage bond, 
so long as death does not come in to separate the man and 
wife — that that marriage bond is the one contract which no 
power on this earth can dissolve. Consequently, the Catholic 
woman married to the Catholic man knows that the moment 
their lips mutually pronounce their marriage vows, her posi- 
tion is defined and established for evermore : that no one can 
put her down from the holy eminence of wife or of mother, 
and that the throne which she occupies in the household, 
she never can live to see occupied by another ; that her chil- 
dren are assured to her, and that she is left in her undisputed 
empire and control over them. She knows that — no matter 
how the world may prosper or otherwise with her — that she 
is sure, at least, of her position as a wife, and of her claims 
to her husband's love, and of the allegiance of his worship. 
She knows that even though she may have wedded him in 
the days of povei'ty, and that should he rise to some great 
and successful position, — even if he became an emperor, — ■ 
she must rise with him, and that he can never discard her ; 
and consequently she feels that her children are her own, for 
ever. Now, the element of sanctity in the family, even when 
the husband is a good man, — even when he is a sacrament- 
going man, as every Catholic man ought to be, — yet the ele- 
ment of sanctity in the family, and for the family, lies with 
the woman. It is the duty of the mother. She has the 
children under her eye and under her care the live-long day. 
She has the formation of them, — of their character — their 
first sentiments, thoughts, and works, either for good or evil. 
The seed to be planted, — the formation of the soul, — is in the 
mother's hands ; and therefore it is that the character of the 
child mainly depends on the formation which the mother 
gives it. The father is engaged in his office, in keeping his 
business, or at his work all the day long. His example, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



whether for good or bad, is not constantly before the eyes — 
the observant eyes — of the child, as is the example of the 
mother. And so it is, my friends, that all depends upon the 
mother ; and it is of vital importance that that mother should 
blend in herself all that is pure, holy, tender and loving, and 
that she be assured of the sanctity of her position, of which 
the Church assures her by the indissoluble nature of the mar- 
riage tie. 

Again the Church of God follows the child into the school, 
and she puts before the young eye, even before reason has 
opened — she puts before the young sense the sight of things 
that will familiarize the mind of the child with Heaven and 
with heavenly thoughts. She goes before the world, antici- 
pates reason, and tries to get the start of that " mystery of 
iniquity" which, sooner or later, lying in the world, shall be 
revealed to the eyes and the soul of this young child. Hence 
it is that in her system of education she endeavors to mix up 
sacramental graces, lessons of good, pictures of divine things, 
holy statues, little prayers, singing of hymns, — all these 
religious appliances — and endeavors to mingle them all con- 
stantly and largely with every element of human education, 
that the heart may be formed as well as the mind, and that 
the will may be strengthened as well as the intellect and the 
soul of man. If, then, the evil of a bad education be one of 
the evils of society, I hold that the Church of God, in 
her scheme and plan of education, proves that she is the 
salvation of society by touching that evil with a healing 
hand. 

The next great evil affecting the morals of society is the 
sense of irresponsibility. A man outside of the Catholic 
Church is never expected to call himself to account for his 
actions. If he speaks evil words, if he thinks evil thoughts, 
if he does wrong things, the most that he aspires to is a 
momentary thought of God. Perhaps he forms a kind of 
resolution not to do these things any more. But there 
is no excruciating self-examination ; there is no humil- 
iating confession ; there is no care or thought upon 
matters of sorrow ; there is no painstaking to acquire a 
firm resolution ; there are none of the restraints against a 
return to sin with which the sacramental agencies of the 
Catholic Church, especially through the sacrament of pen- 
ance, have made us all familiar. The Catholic man feels 
that the eye of God is upon him. He is told that every time 
the Catholic Church warns him to prepare for a con- 
fession. He is told that every time his eyes, wander- 



158 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ing through the church, rests upon the confessional. 
He is told that every time he sees the priest stand- 
ing there, with his stole on, and the penitent going in 
with tearful eyes, and coming forth with eyes beaming witli 
joy and with the delight of forgiveness. He is told this in 
a thousand ways ; and it is brought home to him by the 
precepts and sacraments of the Church at stated times in the 
year. The consequence is that he is made to believe that he 
is responsible to Almighty God ; and therefore this obliga- 
tion, creating a sense of responsibility, arises, and excites 
this watchfulness of his own conscience. The man who feels 
that the eye of God is upon him will also feel that the eye of 
his own conscience is upon him. For watchfulness begets 
watchfulness. If the master is looking on while a servant is 
doing anything, the servant will endeavor to do it well, and 
he will keep his eye upon the master while the master is 
present. So a soldier, when he is ordered to charge, turns 
his look upon his superior officer, while he dashes into the 
midst of the foe. And so it is with us. Conscience is crea- 
ted ; conscience is fostered and cherished in the soul by a 
sense of responsibility which Almighty God gives us through 
the Church and through her sacraments. What follows from 
this ? It follows that the Catholic man, although in con- 
scious freedom, is conscious that he must always exercise 
that freedom under the eye of God and under the dominion 
of His law ; so that in him, even although he be a sinner for 
a time, the sense of freedom never degenerates into joositive 
recklessness or license. 

Finally, — in the political view of society, — the dangers 
that threaten the world from his aspect, are, first of all- 
absolutism, and injustice, and oppression in rulers ; and sec- 
ondly a spirit of rebellion, even against just and estabhsned 
government among the governed. For the well-ordering of 
society lies in this: That he who governs respects those whom 
he governs ; and that those who are governed by him recog- 
nize in him only the authority that comes to him from God. 
I say f rom God. I do not wish here, or now, to enter into 
the qiiestion as to the source of power, and how far the popu- 
lar element may or may not be that source ; but I do say that 
where the power exists, — even where the ruler is chosen by 
the people, — that he exercises that power then as an official of 
the Almighty God to whom belongs the government of the 
whole system which he has created. If that ruler abuses his 
power, — abuses it excessively, — if he despises those whom he 
governs, — if he has not respect for their rights, their privi- 



THE CATHOLIC iLTSSION. 



159 



leges and their consciences, — then the balance of power is 
lost, and the great evil of political society is inaugurated. If, 
on the other hand, the people, — fickle and inconstant, — do not, 
recognize any sacredness at all in their ruler; they do not 
recognize the principle of obedience to law as a divine prin- 
ciple, — as a necessary principle, without which the world can- 
not live; if they think that among the rights of man — of indi- 
vidual man — is the right to rise in rebellion against authority 
and law, — the second great evil of political society is devel- 
oped, and the whole machinery of the world's government is 
broken to pieces. What is necessary to remedy this ? A 
power — mark my words — a power recognized to be greater 
than that of the people or than that of the people's govern- 
ment. A power, wielded not only over the subject, but over 
the monarch. A power, appealing with equal force and equal 
authority to him who is upon the throne, to him who is at the 
head of armies and empires, and to the meanest and the poor- 
est and the lowest of his subjects. What power has that been 
in history ? Look back for eighteen hundred years. What 
power is it that has been exercised over baron and chieftain, 
king and ruler, no matter how dark the times, — no matter 
how convulsed society was — no matter how confused every 
element of government was, — no matter how rude and bar- 
barous the maimers of men, — how willing they were to assert 
themselves in the fullness of their pride and savage power 
in field and in council ? What power was it came to them, 
during twelve hundred years, from the close of the Roman 
persecutions up till the outbreak of Protestantism ? What 
power was it that told the monarchs of the middle ages that, 
if they imposed an oppressive or unjust tax upon the people, 
they were excommunicated ? What power was it that arose 
to tell Philip Augustus of France, in all the lust of his great- 
ness and his undisputed sway, that if he did not respect the 
rights of his one wife, and adhere to her chastely, he would 
be excommunicated by the Church, and abandoned by his peo- 
ple ? What power was it that came to the voluptuous tyrant 
seated on the Tudor's throne in England, and told him that, 
unless he were faithful to the poor persecuted woman, Cath- 
erine of Arragon, his lawful wife, he would be cut off as a 
rotten branch, and cast — by the sentence of the Church — 
into hell-lire ? What power was it that made the strongest 
and most tyrannical of these rudo mediaeval chieftains, kings, 
and emperors, tremble before it ? Ah, it was the power of the 
Vatican ! It was the voice of the Church, upholding the 
rights of the people ; sheltering them with strong arm, 



260 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

proclaiming that no injustice should be done to them: that 
the rights of the poorest man in the community were as 
sacred as the rights of him who sat upon the throne; and, 
therefore, that she would not stand by and see the people 
oppressed. An ungrateful world is this of ours, to-day, that 
forgets that the Catholic Church was the power that inaugu- 
rated, established, and obtained all those civic and municipal 
rights, all those rights, respecting communities, which have 
formed the basis of what we call our modern civilization ! 
Ungrateful age! that reflects not, or chooses to forget, that 
the greatest freedom the people ever enjoyed in this world, 
they enjoyed so long as they were under the aegis of the 
Church's protection ; that never were the Italians so free as 
they were in the medi aeval Republics of Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, 
and even Florence ; that never were the Spaniards so free 
as when their Cortes, as the ruling voice of the nation, was 
heard resounding in the ears of their monarchs, and respected 
by them ; that never were the English so free as when a 
saint was their ruler; or, when a demon in mortal shape, 
clutched the sceptre, an Archbishop of Canterbury, with the 
knights of the realm closed around him, told him they would 
abandon him and depose him, unless he gave to the people 
that charter which is the foundation of the most glorious 
constitution in the world. And thus, I answer, the Church 
maintained the rights of the people, whenever those rights 
were unjustly invaded by those who were in power. But, to 
the people in their turn, this Church has always preached 
patience, docility, obedience to law, legitimate redress, when 
redress was required. She has always endeavored to calm 
their spirits and to keep them back, even under great and 
sore oppression, from the remedy which the world's history 
tells us has always been worse than the disease which it has 
attempted to cure — viz. : the remedy of rebellion and revolu- 
tion. Such is the history of the Church's past. Have I not 
said with truth, that the Church is the salvation of society; that 
she formed society; that she created what we call the society of 
our day ; and that if it had not been for her, a large percent- 
age of all that forms the literature of our time, would not 
now be in existence ? The most powerful restraints, the most 
purifying influences that have operated upon society for so 
many centuries, would not have sent down their blessings 
tc us; blessings that have been inherited, even by those who 
understood them so little that, their very first act in sepa- 
rating from the Church, was to lay the axe at the very root 
of society, by depriving the sacrament of matrimony of its 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



161 



sacramental and indispensably necessary force. In like 
manner have I not proved that, if there be a vestige of free- 
dom, with the proper assertion of right, in the world to-day, 
it can be traced distinctly to the generating and forming 
action of the Catholic Church during those ages of faith 
when the world permitted itself to be moulded and fashioned 
by her hands. And, as she was in the past, so must she be in 
the future. Shut your eyes to her truths ; every principle of 
human science will feel the shock; and the science of sciences 
will feel it first, — the science of the knowledge of God, and of 
the things which He has given us. What is the truth ? Is it not 
a mere matter of fact, known by personal observation to many 
among us, that the Protestant idea of sin involves infidelity, — 
that is to say, a denial of the divinity of Christ, of the 
inspiration of the Scriptures, and of the existence of God? 
What is the Protestant idea of the sinner ? We have it, for 
instance, in their own description. There is no edifying 
death-bed from the belief which proclaims that the man who 
reads, who believes, with a tame belief, in a certain, rugged 
form of uncompromising devotion and knowledge, to fulfil 
some precepts of the Old Law, but not retained in the iS T ew, 
— as, for instance, that strange, barbarous principle borrowed 
from the times of the Old Testament. His son was a sinner. 
He comes to the father's bedside. He is broken with grief, 
seeing that his father is dying before his eyes. The father 
seizes the opportunity to tell the son: "Remember that 
Christ died for our sins, and that Christ was the son of God." 
He begins then to teach what a Catholic would consider the 
very first elements of the catechism. But to him they were 
the conclusions of a long life of study, and he has arrived, 
now, at the end of his days, at the very point at which the 
little Catholic child starts when he is seven years of age. 
Now in the Catholic Church, these things, which are the 
result of careful inquiry, hard study, the conclusions of years, 
perhaps being admitted as first principles — the time which is 
lost by the Protestant in arriving at these principles, is 
employed by the Catholic in applying them to the conduct 
and the actions of his daily life, — in avoiding this danger or 
that, repenting of this sin or that, praying against this evil 
or that — and so on. Shut your eyes to the truths of Catholic 
teaching and the divine Scriptures themselves, on which you 
fancy, perhaps, that you are building up your religion, are 
shaken from their pedestal of a sure definition, and nothing 
remains but her re-assuring power — even to the inspiration oi 
Go.d's written word. Is not this true ? Where, during the 



162 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



fifteen hundred years that preceded Protestantism, — where 
do we read of the inspiration of the Scriptures being called 
in question ? Where do we read of any theologian omitting 
this phrase, leaving out that sentence, because it did not 
tally with his particular views ? He knew that he might as 
well seek to tie up the hands of God as to change one iota or 
syllable of God's revealed truth. But what do we see during 
the last two hundred years ? Luther began by rejecting the 
Epistle of St. James, calling it " An epistle of straw," because 
there were certain doctrines there that did not suit him. 
From his time, every Protestant theologian has found fault 
with this passage or that of Scripture, as if it was a thing 
that could be changed and turned and forced and shaped to 
answer this purpose or that; — as if the word of God could be 
made to veer about, north, east, south and west — according 
to human wishes; — until at length, in our own day, they 
have undertaken a new version of the Scriptures altogether; 
and this is quietly going on in one great section of the 
Church of England ; while another great section of the 
Church of England disputes its authority altogether, and 
tells you that the doctrinal part of it is only a rule to guide, 
and that the historical part of it is nothing more than a 
myth, like the history of the ancient Paganism of Greece and 
of Rome ! They discard the Church's action upon the morality 
of society; tell her that they do not believe her when she says: 
" accursed is the man or woman that puts a divorce into his or 
her partner's hand;" tell her that they do not believe her 
when she says : "No matter what the conduct of either party 
is, I cannot break the bond that God has made — no matter 
what may be the difference of disposition — no matter what the 
weariness that springs from the union, I cannot dissolve it, 
I cannot alter it." If you dissolve it, I ask you in all earnest- 
ness to what you reduce yourselves ? To what does the 
married woman reduce herself? She becomes — (I blush to 
say it) — she becomes a creature living under the sufferance 
and under the caprices of her husband. You know how easy 
it is to trump up an accusation ! You have but to defame 
that which is so delicate and so tender as a woman's name; — a 
gentle and a tender and a pure woman's good name is tainted 
and destroyed by every breath. ]STo matter how unfounded 
the calumny or the slander, how easy it is first to defame and 
then to destroy it ! At the timo when the Protestant Church 
was called upon by the people in England to admit the lawful- 
ness of divorce, the Catholic Church raised up her voice in 
defence of truth, and warned England that she was going into a 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



163 



deeper abyss, — warned the people that they were going to 
destroy whatever sanctity of society remained among them, 
— warned them that there was an anathema upon the measure 
— upon those who proposed it — upon those who aided it. I 
remember at that time a poor woman in Ireland, — indeed she 
was almost a beggar in her poverty, — asking of me, "Is it 
true, your Reverence, they are going to make a law in 
England to let the husband and wife separate from one 
another and go and marry other people ? " " Yes," I said. 
" Well, I hOpe," she said, " we will not be included in that 
law?" "Oh, no; not at all," I said. "You are all right." 
" Glory be to God !" she said, " I never knew before the 
happiness of being a Catholic. I would rather be married to 
Jimmy, and be sure of him, — no matter how bad he is, — than 
to the first nobleman in the land — for he might come to me 
to-morrow and tell me to go out and take the children with 
me !" 

Such is the Church's action on the morale of society. 
Tell her to shut up her confessionals ; tell her that her priests, 
sitting in those tribunals, are blasphemous usurpers of a 
power that God has never given to man. What follows from 
this ? Oh my friends, do you think that you, or that any of 
you would be better men if you were absolved to-morrow 
from all obligation of ever going to confession again ? Do 
you think we would-draw nearer to God ? Would we look 
more sharply after ourselves ? Do you not think that even 
those very human agencies — the humiliation, the painstaking 
of preparation, the violent effort to get out whatever we must 
confess, — do you not think all these things are a great res- 
traint upon a man, and that they help, independent altogether 
of the higher argument of an offended God, — of the crucified 
Lord bleeding again at the sight of our sins, — independent of 
this, that even the human pride is not a powerful, prevailing 
element in confession ? Most assuredly it is. Most assuredly 
that man will endeavor to serve God with greater purity, 
with greater carefulness, — will endeavor to remember the 
precept of the Saviour : ' You must watch and pray in order 
to enter into salvation," — who is called from time to time to 
sweep the chambers of his own soul, to wash and purify every 
corner of his own heart, to analyze his motives, call himself 
to account, even for his thoughts and words, — examine his 
relations in regard to honesty in regard to charity with his 
neighbor, — examine himself how he fulfills his duties as a 
father, or as a husband, as the case may be ; — that that man, 
who is obliged to do this, is more likely to serve Gcd in pur- 



164 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ity and watchfulness than the man who never, from the cradle 
to the grave, is asked even to consider the necessity of taking 
a few minutes' thought and asking himself, " How do I stand 
with the God of Peace? — how do I stand with the God who 
says : ' Walk forth young man, with light for thine eyes ; and 
in the joy of thy heart remember : for all these things I will 
call thee to account on the day of Judgment.' " Remove 
this action of the Church upon the good conduct of society ; 
and then you will have, indeed, the work which was accom- 
plished, and which is reaping its fulfilment to-day, — the work 
of the so-called great Reformer, Martin Luther, who has 
brought it to this pass, that the world itself is groaning under 
the weight of its own iniquities ; and society rises up and 
exclaims that its very heart within it is rotten by social 
evil. 

Disturb the action of the Church upon political society, 
and what guarantee have you for the future ? You may see 
irom the past what is to be in the future ; for, when Luther 
broached his so-called " Reformation," the principle upon 
which he went was that the Catholic Church had no busi- 
ness to be a universally Catholic body ; that she should 
break herself up into national Churches — the Church of 
Germany, the Church of England, the Church of France, the 
Church of America, and so on. And, in fact, Protestantism 
to this day in England is called the Church of England; — 
their oath broken — and no essential bond of unity centering 
in the Pope — centering in the Pope as the infallible guardian 
of the truth — centering in the Pope as the supreme head and 
ruler — that that central unity being dissolved, the Church 
would break up into a congeries of national churches. The 
necessary consequence that immediately followed was that 
the King, if it was a Kingdom, or the President, if it was a 
Republic, — no matter who he may be, — became the head of 
the Church — if it was a national Church — as well as the 
head of the nation. The two powers were concentrated in 
him — one as Governor — head of the State ; by another, he 
will try to exercise the power of which the Pope was the head. 
He was to become king over the consciences of the people, 
as well as ruler of their external public actions. He was to 
make laws for the soul as well as for the body. He was to 
tell them what they were to believe and how they were 
to pray, as well as to tell them their duties as citizens. He 
was to lead them to Heaven! Oh, yes, to Heaven ! The 
man who led his armies in the battle-field was then to per- 
suade his people that the way to Heaven lay through rapine 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



165 



and through blood ! But so it was. And, strange to say, in 
every nation in Europe that accepted Protestantism the 
monarch became a tyrant at once. The greatest tyrant that 
ever governed England was the man who introduced Protes- 
tantism. So long as Henry the Eighth was a Catholic- — • 
although he was a man of terrible passions, — still, the 
Church, reminding him of his soul, bringing him occasion- 
ally to the Confessional, trying to shake him out of his iniq- 
uities, — had some control over him ; and he conquered his 
passions, and kept himself honorable and pure. The moment 
that this man cast off his allegiance to the Church, — the very 
day he proclaimed that he was emancipated from the Pope, 
and did not believe in the Pope or acknowledge him any 
more, — that very day he turns to Anne Boleyn, takes and 
proclaims her his wife, — Catharine, his rightful wife, still 
living ; and, in a few days, when his heart grew tired of 
Anne, and his eyes were attracted by some other beauty, he 
sent Anne to the block, and had her head cut off — and he 
took another lady in her place ; and, in a short time he cut 
off her head, also. And so, Gustavus Vasa, of Sweden, when 
he became a Protestant, at once assumed and became the 
head of a most terrible absolute monarchy. The very kings 
of the Catholic countries imitated their Protestant confreres 
in this respect, for we find the Catholic monarchs of Spain 
cutting off the ancient privileges of the people in the 
Cortes, saying : — " I am the State, and every man must 
obey ! " It is quite natural. The more power you give into 
a man's hands the more absolute he becomes. The more you 
concentrate in him the spiritual as well as the temporal 
power, the more audaciously will he exercise both temporal 
and spiritual power, and the more likely is it that you are 
building up in that man a tyrant — and a merciless tyrant — 
to oppress you. From the day that society emancipated 
itself by Protestantism from the action of the Church, — 
from that day revolution, rebellion, uprising against author- 
ity is the order of the day ; until at length Protestantism 
resolves itself into a society which swears eternal enmity, 
not only to the altar but to the throne. 

And so, my dear friends, we see that we cannot move 
without the Churcl of God ; that nations may go on for a 
time, and may be upheld by material prosperity ; but with- 
out a surer basis they will certainly be overthrown. The 
moments are coming, and coming rapidly, when all the 
society of this world that wishes to be saved, will have to 
cry out with a mighty voice to the Catholic Church. Pet- 



166 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION 



secuted, despised, to-day, she comes to us with her light of 
truth — she comes to us with her sanctifying influences — she 
comes with her glorious dominion over king and subject, to 
save them from the ruin which they have brought upon their 
own heads. — There will be a day of grace for man. It wil. 
be the day of the world's necessity. And when that day 
comes, — and I behold it now in my mental vision, — this 
uprising of the whole world in the hands of the Church, — I 
see thee, Oh glorious spouse of Christ ! — Oh, mother Church, 
I see thee seated once more, in the councils ol the nations, 
guiding them with a divinely infused light — animating them 
with thy spirit of justice. I see thee, O mother, blending, as, 
of old, I saw amid the Forum, rise a glorious city out of the 
ruins of the Goth and Visigoth and Vandal : so out of the 
men of this day, — relapsing into chaos through neglect of 
thee, — do I behold thee forming the glorious city that shall 
be ; a society in which men shall be loyal and brave, truth- 
ful, pure and holy ; a city in which the people shall grow up 
formed by thee for God ; a city in which all men, governors 
and governed, will admit the supremacy of law, the sanctity 
of principle, the omnipotence of justice ! And, oh, Mother, 
in the day when that retribution comes — in that day of the 
world's necessity — the triple crown shall shine again upon 
the brows of thy chief, Peter's successor, and the Vicar of 
Christ ; upon that honored brow shall shine forth again the 
triple crown, — the most ancient and the holiest in the world ; 
and the prince of peace will extend his sceptre over the 
nations; and every man will rejoice in a new life ! 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon preached by the Rev. Father Burke, on the occasion of 
the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Bishop Hendricken, Sunday, April 28 
in the Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, Providence, R. I.] 



CONSECRATION OF BISHOP HENDRICKEN*. 



" You know that how when I preached the Gospel to you heretofore, 
ye despised me not, nor rejected me, but received me as an angel of Grod, 
even as Jesus Christ.'' 

These words, Most Rev. Archbishop, Right Rev. Bishops, 
and dearly beloved brethren, were spoken by St. Paul to the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



167 



Galatians. They were strange and daring words for a man 
to speak. " You received me," he says, " not only as if I 
were an angel sent unto you from God ; but you received me 
as if I were Jesus Christ the Lord." Yet the same Apostle 
distinctly says in the same epistle : " Though an angel from 
heaven preached a Gospel to you beside that which we have 
preached, let him be anathema." 

All this St. Paul said ot himself, because he was an Apos- 
tle and a Bishop in the Church of God. To-day, dearly be- 
loved brethren, you are assembled before this altar also to 
receive one who is sent unto you, and to leceive him not even 
as an angel, but as if it were the Lord Jesus Christ that rose 
before you in all the fulness of His power, in all His infinite 
sanctity, and in that unity of person by which He was one 
with the Father. This which you are called upon to witness 
here to-day is one of the greatest mysteries of the Church — 
the consecration of a simple priest into the Episcopacy ; the 
conferring upon a man the fulness of that power which he 
before, as a priest, exercised over the real and mystical body 
of Christ. In the consecration of a bishop, as we shall see 
most wonderfully, most vividly, most terribly if you will, in the 
man of faith, Jesus Christ descends again and enters into a 
man, consecrating him with the highest sanctity, endowing 
him with the greatest power, and binding that man to 
Him through the Church and the Church's head, with a 
unity the most wonderful of anything that is seen upon the 
earth. 

Dearly beloved brethren, we are all called upon to be 
made like to our Lord and Saviour J esus Christ. In this lies 
the calling, the jurisdiction, the glory of every one among us, 
for the Apostle says that those whom He foreknew He predestin- 
ated to be made like unto the image of His Son, and those 
whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified 
He also glorified. But as there are diversities of gifts in the 
same spirit, so there are many various ways in which we are, 
according to our calling, to become like to Jesus Christ. In 
humility, in purity of heart, in love of God, in hatred of sin, 
we are all called upon to be made like to the Son of God. 
But there are in Christ higher and greater gifts, net neces- 
sary for all, but only for a few — these gifts that are in the Son 
of God as the founder and governor, and perpetual head of 
His Church. Of these all men stand not in need, but only the 
few who inherit his ministry, and who are called upon to ful- 
fil this office in the Church of God. And now when we come 
to contemplate Christ our Lord in this high and glorious func- 



1G8 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



tion as founder and ruler of the Church, what do we behold ? 1 
answer we behold three especial gifts — union with God, the 
most wonderful ; power unlimited, even to omnipotence ; and 
sanctity such as was becoming the perfect Son of God. As 
founder and ruler of the Church, it was necessary that He 
should be united with God m the ineffable and hypostatical 
union, in which out of three one was made, namely, a human 
body, a human soul, and God ! Out of the union of these 
three comes Jesus Christ the Lord. That ineffable union with 
God was necessary to Him as founder of the Church. Why ? 
First, because no one but God Himself could found such a 
Church as that which Jesus Christ founded. Secondly, be- 
cause it was necessary to stamp upon the Church herself, in 
unity of doctrine, in unity of obedience, in perfect unity of 
thought of mind, of will, and of heart, a resemblance of the 
union that bound her founder, in this sacred humanity, person- 
ally to Almighty God. No one but God could found the 
Catholic Church ; for the Catholic Church is a mystery of con- 
stant assertion of the same truth, ever ancient yet always 
new ; derived from the Ancient of Days in Heaven, unchanged 
throughout all the changes of time and thought, yet sufficient, 
and simply sufficient for all the intellectual and all the spiritual 
wants of the age. That Church, whose law never changes, be- 
cause truth is the same throughout all ages, must be of God. 
She has never changed one word of her doctrine; she has never 
denied what she once taught; she has never tolerated, much less 
asserted, an untruth ; in the 1900 years of her existence she has 
never been found wanting as an unfailing guide ; it can never 
be said that in such an age or such a day she told the people 
a lie. That Church must represent God, because truth is of 
God. Side by side with her, systems of philosophy, modes 
of thought, demonstrations, or what may appear to be demon- 
strations, of science, have all been raised up, and abandoned 
and disavowed, acknowledged as false in their principles, and 
defective in their application, in the course of ages. In the 
wreck of all systems of philosophy, of governments, and of 
science, the Church alone rises up like a rock in the midst of 
the tossing, changeful waves, serene, immovable, proclaiming 
with a living voice the truth of God as it was in Jesus 
Christ. 

Therefore, He that founded the Church must be God, and 
justly does He call the Kingdom that He was about to estab- 
lish, and of which He was to be King, the principality of 
peace. Consequently, He was united to God, because it was 
necessary that the brand of that by which He was one with 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



169 



the Father should be set upon the Church — unity of thought, 
accepting the same doctrine, clinging to the same truth, speak- 
ing in the self-same language ; unity of will, recognizing one 
centra] power, recognizing that power diffused so as to meet 
the wants of every people and every time, yet all entering in 
one, Jesus Christ, and bowing down to the Church's spiritual 
authority as it bowed down to Almighty God. 

Therefore it was that, as founder and ruler of the Church, 
Jesus Christ our Lord stands before us and represents princi- 
ple of Truth ; as God, He is one with the Father by that 
ineffable union of natures which mind cannot conceive, nor 
has it entered into the heart of man to understand, much less 
to describe. And when the Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity, in the fulness of His mercy became man, He still pre- 
served in the mystery of the Incarnation the principle of 
unity ; for, although He took to Him another nature infi- 
nitely inferior to Him, infinitely unworthy of Him but for 
His mercy, yet when He did become man He so united our 
nature to the Divine as to make it one. He took the human 
soul, the human body, the human heart, the human affections, 
the human relations, everything, in order that from that 
union of soul and body in Him should arise the personality 
and originality of a man. He assumed the man into God. 
As such He suffered, God and man, upon the Cross. As such 
He arose, God and man, from the tomb. As such He carried 
that humanity, which he never divested Himself of, to the 
high places of glory, to be seated at the right hand ot the 
Father. And so Jesus Christ is the image of God because 
He is God, because He is in Him ; and the Church is the 
image of Jesus Christ, for the Church alone on this earth 
represents the principle of unity, unity of thought in one 
Father, of expression in one belief, of obedience of the will. 
I was almost about to say that such is the unity which Christ 
the Lord has conferred upon His Church, that had He denied 
her all other gifts, her unity alone would preserve her, upon 
the human principle that that which is united can never be 
destroyed. 

The second attribute that Christ possessed as founder of 
the Church, and that passed from Him to His Church, iy 
power. " All power," said Christ, " in Heaven and on earfe! 
is given to me." Therefore Jesus Christ, the Man God, was 
Omnipotent, for all power was given unto Him. His actions 
were divine and not human. The action of that which is 
divine must be omnipotent. Well might the people wonder 
when they saw the dead springing from their graves at the 
8 



170 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



Bound of His voice. Well might they wonder when He 
preached to them, for He taught them as one who had power, 
ind not as the Scribes. He said to His apostles — "The 
Father has sent Me from Heaven, and He sent Me with all 
power ; as the Father sent me, I send you." And He gave 
them power, power for the administration of the spiritual 
kingdom, power' to break the bonds of sin ; power to raise 
the spiritually dead from the sepulchre unto the glory and 
strength and liberty of the children of God. That power the 
Church possesses in her priesthood, power to call down and 
invoke the Eternal from His throne of glory, and substantia- 
ting Him and making Him really present upon the altar 
under the appearances of bread and wine ; power over the 
mystical body oi Christ which is the life of the faithful : 
power over the people, and power to feed them with the 
word of doctrine and with the imperishable bread of angels ; 
and power to lift from their souls the weight of sin that the 
hand of God alone can remove. The third and the crowning 
attribute of Christ as founder and the ruler of the Church is 
scmctity. The fulness of the Divinity dwells in Flim ; all that 
God has of perfection is in Jesus Christ. He came down 
from Heaven so holy that at the very sight of His holiness 
the Eternal Father forgot the sins and the anger of 4,000 
years ; so holy that' the Heavens were rent and the voice of 
the Father filled the clouds saying, " This is my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased ; " so holy that one tear shed from 
those sacred eyes, one aspiration of prayer from those benign 
lips, one drop of blood from those blessed hands, was more 
than sufficient to wipe away the sins of ten thousand worlds, 
because of His infinite holiness and acceptability before the 
Eternal God. 

That holiness even in its perfection, not in any graduated 
or lesser degree, did Christ our Lord set upon this Church, 
that it might be a sign of her, and that she should bind to 
her brows, forever more, the very sanctity of Christ. I prove 
this, first of all, from the inspired Word. St. Paul declares 
that Christ loved His Church as He loved Himself; that He 
gave Himself for His Church because He loved her, and in 
order that He might present to His Father a glorious Church, 
perfect in her holiness. Therefore, the word of the prophet 
is fulfilled in the word of the Apostle. For the 1,800 years of 
the existence of the Church, she has never for a single 
moment tolerated even the slightest sin. Examine the moral 
law which she has enforced for so many centuries ; I defy any 
man to lay his finger on any edict or law of the Church in 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

which. ther3 was the slightest sin against God or man; I defy 
any man to be able to point to the time when the Catholic 
Church allowed a single sin to go unrebuked. 

X ow, dearly beloved brethren, having seen the three great 
attributes of Jesus Christ, as the founder and ruler of Hia 
Church, namely, unity, sanctity, and perfection — now we see 
the reason of St. Paul speaking these strange words to the 
Galatians: "You received me not only as an angel of God, 
but as Christ Jesus." It was because he came to them as a 
Bishop of the Church, in the fulness of his sacerdotal power 
and privilege; in the fulness of that power and sanctity which 
the Church gives to her priests, and completes in her bishops; 
and therefore he congratulated the Galatians because they, 
having true Catholic faith, recognized in him their bishop, 
the attributes of Jesus Christ, as the founder and ruler of the 
Church. For such is a bishop in the Church of God, embody- 
ing the three great attributes, so far as man can partake of 
them — the unity, the sanctity of Jesus Christ. The bishop 
is lifted up among his brethren; he is brought one step 
nearer to the great representative, Jesus Christ, our Lord; 
he is admitted to the sacred counsels of the Church of God; 
he is loaded with responsibility, because of his elevation. 
The attributes of our Lord are his, but first is sanctity. Oh ! 
my friends, I might quote the words of the greatest doctors 
of the Church in speaking of the sanctity of the priest- 
hood. St. Augustine extols the order of men bound to 
virgin purity; and St. John Chrysostom said of the priest- 
hood : "This life is a Godlike life; this profession is an 
angelic profession." How can I find words to express the 
full sanctity of that state ? Oh ! great God, a man speaks a 
few words standing at an altar, holding a piece of bread in 
his hands and all Heaven is in commotion. Every angel 
prostrates himself in adoration; for the Almighty God rises 
on His throne, and places Himself, by a wonderful incarnation, 
in the hands of him whose voice calls forth a response from 
Heaven. How can I speak of the dignity and sanctity of 
. that state which brings a man into such awful contact with 
the Almighty — to hold God in his hands, &nd speak to God as 
a man speaks to his friend ? Such is the brightness of the 
glory of the priesthood; such was the sight shown to Moses 
on the mountain, which ever after enrayed his head with 
glory; and as Moses came from the mountain, having seen 
God, so the priest comes down from the altar with the awful 
sanctity of having seen Jesus Christ. 

And yet in us priests the Church has, as it were, but the 



172 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



beginning of the priesthood. It is there in all the integrity 
of its power over the mystical and real body of the Lord ; 
but the priesthood is not there in the simple priest in its 
full perfection. Why? Because nothing is perfect until it 
is able to produce something like itself. The priesthood in 
the simple priest cannot generate a priesthood. But the 
Church comes, the Spouse of Jesus Christ, and she confers 
upon a man the awful attribute of being able, by the impo- 
sition of his hands and the breath of his consecration, to send 
forth from him into his fellow-man the living Spirit of God j 
to endow a man with power to consecrate bread and wine 
into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. What sanctity, 
herefore, must be upon those lips that are able not only to 
speak the words of the Spirit of God, but to send forth that 
spirit, in the awfulness of its power, to penetrate the soul of 
another man. Here are those bishops, with the priests 
around them, to-day : here is this man who entered this 
church this morning a simple priest. He embraces the 
archbishop and his fellow bishops, and they breathe the 
power of Jesus Christ and his sanctity ; and this evening, if 
that man imposes his hands upon a layman among you, he 
makes that man a priest of God, and produces in another 
that priesthood which is made perfect in himself. He 
becomes a fountain of power and sanctity. Those lips must 
be holy from which the Spirit of God goes out ; those hands 
must be holy that are able to convey Christ into the body of 
a fellow-man. 

Behold, my brethren, the power of the episcopacy. 
Here this Bishop has the power to breathe upon a man the 
same Spirit which Christ gave to His Apostles when he said 
to them : " Whose sins ye shall forgive they are forgi yen : 
whose sins ye shall retain they are retained ;" and suddenly 
the priest who kneels before him receives the power to 
forgive sins. And it is not merely the power to declare the 
sin forgiven, but it is the power of removing utterly the 
stain of sin from the repentant sinner. It is not the priest 
that does this, he is only the voice — the word must come 
from God ; just as my voice speaks the words of my mind, 
so the priest, conferring the sacraments, speaks the words 
of Jesus Christ. The principle of unity is j>reserved 
in the Church by that wonderful organization that is the 
admiration of every philosopher. Christ's Divinity was 
hidden in His humanity ; so in the Church all things stand 
ip. Christ. Christ was the image of God ; the Church is 
the image of Christ. All power and all sanctity come 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



173 



from this one ineffable head, speaking, acting, governing 
through, the visible head, Christ's representative, the Pope 
of Rome 

The bishops of the Church are its interpreters and guides ; 
and the history of the Church tells us that whenever danger 
threatened the Church, the bishops have never been wanting 
in their duty. There is no order in the Church that has 
given so many martyrs as the Episcopal order. Their very 
purple seems to be a reminder of the purple of martyrdom. 
The very martyr of our own day, the Archbishop of Paris, 
laid down his life, proclaiming that Jesus Christ was the only 
Lord and Saviour. 

When we consider then, dearly beloved brethren, what a 
Bishop is — bearing jurisdiction to his clergy, preserving his 
people from every error, and securing to them and to their 
children eternal salvation, I ask you is it not a source of 
inexpressible joy to behold a new diocess instituted in this 
land to-day? There is joy in heaven for this fountain of 
special power which is opened to the dwellers in the House 
of David. There is joy in heaven for Him who is consecra- 
ted to-day — another in the line of bishops from whom the 
sacramental power shall flow forever. And if there is joy 
for one sinner who does repentance, what joy must there be 
to see a fountain of grace opened up to the faithful. 

That joy is enhanced for me, and I know that it is 
enhanced for many of you, by knowing that the chosen one 
is a child of our race. The Church is not bound to any race 
or people, She comes speaking every tongue, under every 
clime, and every government, only seeking to save the souls 
of men from hell. But the highest glory of any people has 
always been the glory of helping the Catholic Church — the 
glory of giving from out the national womb a priesthood to 
labor in and to govern this Church. That glory, even in the 
midst of suffering and sorrow, has been given to the Irish 
race. This glory, from the first day that the light dawned 
on St. Patrick in the land has been spreading ever abroad 
until Ireland's episcopacy has been recognized by the world. 
This cedar of God, lifting its stately head from the mountain 
top of desolation, puts forth to-day another fruitful branch # 
another ruler in the Church of Christ. This tree of Ireland's 
Christianity has not grown old with years, although the 
bianches have been cut off again and again, and its roots 
have been watered by blood and tears. The proof of its 
youth and its strength is that to-day it is able to send forth 
another bishop in the Church, a long tried priest, full of faith 



174 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION, 



and devotion to Jesus Christ; to give another among the 
lights of the world, the salt of the earth. Oh, no, our mother 
is as young to-day as ever : here is the proof. One of her 
children has been found worthy of being raised to the 
episcopacy. The Church of God declaring him worthy, calls 
him to this high office that he should represent the perfect 
sanctity of Jesus Christ, that he should hold forth the 
Church's power unto the brethren of the priesthood, and 
that he should bear forth the sacred principles of that 
unity which binds the Church to her head, and binds that 
head to Jesus Christ, its crown. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered in St. Stephen's Church, Twenty-eighth street, 
New York, on Tuesday evening, April 30th, by the Rev. Father 
Burke, for the benefit of the mission to the colored race in this 
country, which is being established under the special direction and 
authority of the Supreme Pontiff.] 



" THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE TRUE EMANCIPATOR." 



My Dear Friends: I am come before you this evening 
to assert a proposition which would require no proof, if all men 
were of one mind regarding the claims of the Catholic Church 
to be the Church of Christ. I assert for the Catholic Church 
that she is the true emancipator of the slave ; and I say again, 
that if men were of one mind touching her claims to be the 
true Christian Church, thfs proposition would require no 
proof ; for any man who believes in the agency of Christ as 
perpetuated in his Church, must at once conclude that one of 
the highest and greatest of the duties of that Church is the 
duty which her Divine founder, Himself, came to accomplish, 
viz.: the work of emancipation. He came and found, not 
this race, or that, — not this class or order of men, or that, — 
but all mankind, and all races of men, enslaved in the direst 
form of slavery — a slavery that entered into their very souls ; 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



175 



a slavery that not only destroyed their freedom of will, but also 
clouded, and thereby destroyed, the clearness of their intelli- 
gence; a slavery that bound them helpless at the feet of the 
most cruel of all masters, — for that master was no other than 
the devil, the prince and ruler of all mankind, the enslaver of 
the intellect, of the will, and of the soul of man. The 
proph 3t of old had foretold of our Divine Lord and Redeemer, 
that he came to break the chains of man's slavery, to 
emancipate him, to take him from out that deep and terrible 
servitude into which he was fallen, and to endow him once 
more with "the glory of the freedom of the children of God." 
Therefore He came. Among all the other titles that be- 
longed to Him is that preeminently of the emancipator of an 
enslaved and a fallen race. And if His action is to continue in 
the Church, — if His graces are to flow on through that 
Church, and His light is to come forth, pure and bright and 
radiant in the Church which He founded, — all we have to do 
is to find that Church; and bound to her brows, we shall find 
the crown of the emancipator of the human race. That 
Church we, Catholics, know and believe to be the Mother 
that has begotten us unto God, through the Gospel. 

Now, my friends, how did Christ effect the work of 
His emancipation ? I answer that He emancipated or freed 
the intelligence of man from the slavery of the intellect, 
which is error ; and that He emancipated the will of man 
from the slavery of the will, which is sin. And He carefully 
defined what manner of freedom He came to found and 
confer, when He said to a benighted race, whom He had 
enlightened : " You shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free ! " And to a degraded and corrupt race, He 
said : " I am come that, where sin hath abounded, grace might 
abound still more;" and, in the abundance of His grace He 
called us unto the freedom of the children of God. 

Behold, then, the elements, of emancipation, as found 
in the actions and in the words of the Son of God, the 
Redeemer, the Saviour, and the Emancipator. Truth ! 
Truth broadly diffused ; truth borne upon the wings of 
knowledge unto every mind. Not speculation, but truth, 
not opinion but knowledge ; not study of the truth, but 
possession of the truth. "There," says the Son of God, 
" lies the secret of your intellectual freedom." Therefore 
He lifted up His voice ; He flung abroad the banner of his 
eternal truth ; He called all men to hear the sound of His 
voice, and to rally round the standard of His truth and of 
His knowledge. And the word which He spoke was 



176 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



borne upon the wings of the angels for all future time, 
unto the farthest ends of the earth, upon the lips of the 
preaching and infallible Church which He founded ; I say 
the " preaching Church," which he founded, for " Faith comes 
by hearing ;" and the knowledge which emancipates the 
intelligence must come by a living voice. But, 1 add, — as 
no other knowledge save that of the pure truth as it is in 
the mind of Jesus Christ, thus delivered by a living voice, 
can emancipate the intelligence of man, therefore the voice 
which He commanded to teach the world, must bear the 
unfailing, and infallible, and unmixed message of the truth 
of the Lord Jesus Christ ! For, if that voice can admit the 
slightest blending of error — if that voice can falter in the 
delivery of the truth — or mix up the slightest distortion of 
error with that truth — it ceases to be the voice of Jesus 
Christ, and it only, in its teachings, substitutes one form of 
slavery for another. Oh, if the men of our day would only 
understand this ; if the men who boast of their civilization 
would only understand this — that whatever is not the truth 
is not the voice nor the message of God ; — whatever, by any 
possibility can be untrue, cannot be the voice of God; — if men 
would only understand this that there is no greater insult 
than we can offer to a God of Truth than to take a religious 
lie — a distorted view — a false idea, — put it into our minds, and 
say, " This is the truth of God ; this is the religious truth ! " 
But, no ! We boast to-day of our liberality ; we boast 
to-day of the multitude of our sects and of our religious 
institutions ; we boast to-day of an open Bible from which 
every man draws — not the word of God ; for I deny that it 
is the Word of God ; — it is the Word of God only when it 
is taken from that page as it lies in the mind of God — we 
boast to-day that that Bible is open tc every man to look in 
it for the canonization of his own error, lying in his dis- 
torted meaning given to that divinely-inspired page ; — and 
then we pretend that all this is a mark of religion : and the 
man who would indignantly resent a lie, told him in the 
ordinary avocations and social duties of life — the man who 
would resent as a deep injury being taken in a matter of 
business, in the furnishing of an account, or any such transi- 
tory thing, — is precisely the man that is most indifferent, and 
careless, and most easily reconciled, when it is a matter that 
lies between him and the God of Truth, whether he possesses 
that truth or not. Yet, I say again, it is a disreputable thing 
to be taken in by a lie — to believe a lie. It is a mark of 
intellectual and moral imbecility to cling to a lie and uphold 



*• 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 177 

it as the truth. And remember that, when it is a matter 
between us and God — the interpretation of tne message of 
God — the tone that the voice of God takes in falling upon 
our ear, — remember that whatever is not true as to God, is 
the worst form of untruth — or, a lie ; and that the truth of 
God is declared to be, by the Saviour of the world, the 
essential, primary element of that emancipation with which 
Jesus Christ came down to free us. 

But, dear friends, grand and magnificent as is the posses- 
sion of that truth, luminous as the light which is poured 
into the soul from Almighty God, through the windows, 
as it were, of Divine truth, it is not enough to accomplish 
the freedom of man. The soul of freedom lies not only 
in the mind, possessing truth, and thus shaking off the chains 
of intellectual slavery, which is error ; but it also lies in the 
will, sanctified, strengthened, and purified by the Divine 
grace of Jesus Christ. Of what avail to you my fellow-men, 
or to me, that we should know all knowledge ? — that we 
should have all knowledge ? — if a man is a slave to his own 
passions — if every degrading passion and inclination of a 
base or an inferior nature has only to cry out imperiously to 
be instantly served and gratified at the expense of the soul's 
nobility and life, and at the expense of God's- friendship and 
His grace. Of what avail is knowledge to a man if that man 
be impure ? Of what avail are the soundest principles or ex- 
amples moral or divine, to that man who, holding them, does 
not act up to them, but is dishonest ? And therefore, there is 
another and a more terrible slavery, even than that of the intel- 
lect; and that is, the slavery of the will. Now, to meet this 
Christ, our Lord, the divine healer, the divine physician of 
our souls, established certain means by which His grace, His 
strength, His purity, was to be communictaed to us, to our 
wills, just as by the preaching of the Gospel in the Church 
her light is communicated to our intelligence. And these 
means are the sacred morality of the Church's laws ; the sa- 
cred barriers that she uprears between the soul and sin ; the 
sacramental graces that she pours forth to heal the soul, and 
purify it, and cleanse it again, if it be tainted and sullied by 
sin ; the agencies that she holds in her hands to preserve that 
soul from a relapse into sin, strengthening it so that it is able 
to command all its passions, to repress all undue and corrupt- 
ing inclinations, to give a triumph to the spirit over matter — ■ 
to the soul over the body — until the Lord Jesus Christ, who 
was not only the fountain of all truth but the creator of all 
holiness, and its representative, here produced again in ihe 
8* 



178 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



souls of all His children, and a perfect people be reared up in 
sanctity to God. 

Without this grace of the heart and the will, there is no 
freedom. Without the agency of the Church, I say, as a rule, 
there can be no grace. Without her sacraments, the will of 
man — the will of man which may be enslaved — the will of 
man which is enslaved whenever man is in sin — can never be 
touched; for the sacramental hand of the Church alone can 
touch it. And, here, again, as the word of the Church's 
teaching, must be no other than the word of Jesus Christ 
himself — not only as it is written in the inspired volumes, but 
as it lies in the mind of God, and, therefore, the Church is 
bound to explain it ; so, also, the graces of the Church and 
the agency that she has in her hands to touch the will, must 
be no other than the very power, the very action, the very 
grace of Jesus Christ. No other hand but His, no other 
power but His — no other influence but His — the Lord, the 
Redeemer, the Saviour — coming home to every individual 
man, can purify that man's soul, and strengthen him to gain 
the victory which conquereth the world, the flesh and the 
devil — the victory of Divine faith ! For, of what avail to 
me, I ask you, of what avail to me is it that a priest should 
lift up his hand and say, " I absolve thee from thy sin," 
unless that word, that grace, that power to do it, come 
to that priest from Jesus Christ ? Of what avail to me 
that a man pour water on my head and say, "I baptize thee 
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," unless 
that baptism, that water had the Sacramental elements, 
instituted by the Lord, endured with a peculiar power for 
this purpose, — the cleansing of the soul, — be tinged mystically 
with the saving blood of the Redeemer ? Of what avail to 
me if I come to this altar, open my mouth, and receive what 
appears to be a morsel of bread, unless the Redeemer of the 
world had said : "Without me you can do nothing. And 
now, I will come to you. Take ye — and eat of this ; — for 
this is my body and my blood." Therefore, it is the action 
of Jesus Christ thai must remain as powerful, as pure, as mei- 
ciful in the dispensation of the Church's grace, — as her words 
must be pure from error, and unmixed with error upon the lips 
of the Church's preaching ? Behold the two great elements of 
man's emancipation. Wherever these are not there is a 
slavery. He that believes a lie — and, above all, a religious 
untruth, is a slave. He that commits sin is the slave of sin. 

What avails it that you emancipate a man — strike the 
chains of his hands — send him forth, in name a free man— 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



179 



send him forth with every constitutional right and civic 
privilege upon him — send him forth, glorying in his freedom, 
without understanding it, and, perhaps, prepared to abuse it ? 
If you leave that man's intelligence under the gloom oi 
ignorance — if you leave that man's will under the dominion 
of sin and of his own passions, have you made him a free man? 
You call him a free man. But God in Heaven, and, unfor- 
tunately, the devil in hell, laughs and scoffs at your idea of 
freedom. 

And, now, my friends, this being the mission, declared and 
avowed by our Divine Lord, — this, consequently, being the 
mission handed into the hands of the Church to be fulfilled 
by her, if we turn to the Church's history and see whether 
she has been faithful to her duty in thus applying the 
elements of emancipation to man. It is a historical question, 
and one that I must deal with, principally, historically. 
Now, in order to understand it, we are, first of all to 
consider, what was the state of the world when the Church 
began her mission? How did she find society? Was it 
barbarous or civilized ? I answer that the Church's mission, 
when she first opened her lips to preach the Gospel, was to a 
most civilized and highly intellectual people. Augustus was 
m his grave, but the Augustan era, the proudest, the highest 
and most civilized yet shed its influence over Rome. All 
the wisdom of the ancients, all the dicta of Pagan philosophy 
— was represented in that august assembly before which, upon 
the hill of Athens, Paul the Apostle, stood up to preach the 
"Resurrection and the Life." All the light of ancient 
philosophy was there. All the glory of art was there in its 
highest perfection. All the resources then attained to in 
science were there. Men were glorying in that day, as they 
are in this, in their material progress and in their ideas. 
But how ? How was this society constituted with regard to 
slavery? Why, my friends, in that ancient Pagan world, we 
read, that at the time when there were sixty thousand inhabi- 
tants in the city of Athens, the capital of Greece, there were 
forty thousand slaves and only twenty thousand freemen. We 
read how, in the society of Sparta, another city of Greece, the 
slaves had so multiplied that the masters lived in constant fear, 
lest their servants — their bondsmen — should rise up in their 
power and destroy them. We read of Rome, that the slaves 
were in such numbers, that when it was proposed in the 
Senate that they should wear a distinct dress, it was 
immediately opposed on the ground that if they wore a 
distinct dress they would come to recognize their own 



180 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



numbers and strength, and would rise and sweep the freemen 
from the soil. So much for the civilized nations. What do 
we know of the barbarous nations ? Why, Herodotus, the 
histoiian, tells us, that on one occasion, a nation of Scythians 
went forth "and invaded Medea; and, when they returned 
after a successful war, flushed with triumph and with victory, 
such was the number of the slaves that they had enslaved, 
from the misfortunes of war and other causes, that actually, 
when they returned in all their might, they found that in 
their absence, their slaves had revolted, and they were chased 
by their own servants — their own slaves — from their own 
country. How were these slaves treated ? They were 
treated thus : We read that when a certain Prefect of Rome, 
• itellius Secundus, was murdered by one of his slaves, and as 
a matter of course, following the law, there were four 
hundred of that man's bondsmen taken, and they were all 
put to death without mercy, without pity; — four hundred 
innocent men for the fault and the crime of one. Had the slave 
any rights? None whatever. Had the slave any privilege 
or recognition of any kind ? None whatever. His life and 
his blood were accounted as of no value; and what was still 
Worse, the highest philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, 
writing on this subject, laid down as a principle, that these 
men were created by the gods, as they called them, for the 
purpose of slavery; that they came into this world for no 
other purpose; that they had no souls capable of appreciating 
anything spiritual, no feelings to be respected, no eternal nor 
even temporal interests to be consulted; so that a man who 
had the misfortune to fall into slavery, found himself not only 
enslaved but degraded. 

Such was the state of the world when the Catholic Church 
began her mission. And now, w r hat was the first principle 
that the Church preached and laid down ? The first emanci- 
pating principle that the Catholic Church announced was 
this : She proclaimed that slavery was no degradation; that 
n man might be enslaved and yet not be degraded. This was 
the first principle by which the Church of God recognized the 
nobility of the soul of man, — no matter from what race he 
sprang ; no matter what misfortune may have fallen upon 
him, — that he might be enslaved, nay, more, that his very 
slavery might bring its own specific duties upon him. ; but 
that slavery, in itself, was no degradation. You may say to 
me, perhaps, this was a false principle. I answer, ±so ; it is 
not a false principle. I am a slave ; yet I am not a degraded 
man. I am a slave ; for, many years ago, I swore away, at 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



181 



tlie foot of the altar, my liberty, my freedom and my will, 
and gave them up to God. Am I, therefore, degraded ? No. 
We are all slaves in this sense — that the Scriptures tell us 
that we have been bought at a great price by our Lord Jesus 
Christ; and, therefore, that we are the servants and bonds- 
men of Him who bought us. But who will say that such sla- 
very as this is degradation. "No, my friends. You may, per- 
haps, say to me, but we all admit our servitude to God. 
Well, this is precisely the point ; and St. Paul, proclaiming 
the first elements of the Church's laws and doctrines touch- 
ing slavery, declared that even a man who was enslaved by 
his fellow-man was no longer a slave — that is, in the sense of 
a degraded slave ; because Almighty God, through His 
Church, recognized that man's soul, — recognized his feelings, 
— and commanded him to be faithful, even as a slave, — not to 
the master as to a man, but to the master for the sake of Jesus 
Christ, and as reflecting authority and power over him. 
These are the express words of the Apostle ; and mark how 
clearly they bring out this grand principle. He says : 
" Whosoever are servants under the yoke, let them account 
their masters worthy of all honor, lest the name of the Lord 
and His doctrines be blasphemed." He goes on to say: 
" You, slaves, obey those that are your masters according to 
the flesh, with fear and trembling in the simplicity of your 
hearts, as to Jesus Christ Himself, not serving to the eye, as 
it were, pleasing men, but as the servants of Christ, doing the 
will of God from the heart, with a good will, serving as to the 
Lord not to man." 

There was the first grand element of the Church's eman- 
cipation. She removed from the slave the degradation of his 
slavery, by admitting that, slave as he was, he could in obey- 
ing his master, obey God ; — transfer his allegiance, as it were 
from the man to the principle of God's authority reflected in 
that man ; and thus serve, not as to the eye of man, but to the 
eye of Jesus Christ. 

Secondly, the Apostle declares that slavery ceased to be a * 
degradation when the master and the owner was as much a 
slave as his bondsman. And this he declares in this principle: 
" And you masters," he says, " do the same thing as your slaves, 
forbearing threatening, knowing that the Lord, both of them 
and of you, is in Heaven, and that there is no respect of per- 
sons with Him." " Masters" He adds, " do to your servants 
that which is just and equal, knowing that you also, have a 
Master who is in Heaven." The Pagan idea was that the 
master was the absolute governor and ruler of his slave, — the 



182 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



lord of life and death, — and that that slave was created to do 
his will ; and that for his treatment of his servant he was not 
responsible before God. The Apostle, in the name of the 
Ohurch, imposes upon the master and slave the common ser- 
vitude to the one God ; and then, he lays down the third 
great element, by which he relieves slavery of its degradation 
when he says ; " There is, in Christ, neither bondsman nor 
freemara, neither Jew nor Gentile, neither barbarian nor 
Scythian, but Christ, the Lord, in all ; and ye are all one in 
Jesus Christ." 

These, my friends, were the first words of consolation, of 
hope, of manly sympathy with his fellow-men in slavery, that 
ever came from the lips of a teacher, religious or otherwise, 
from the world's creation. And these came from the lips of 
the Catholic Church, speaking through her divinely-inspired 
Apostle. Therefore, I claim for her, that, in the beginning, 
she was faithful to her mission, and that she proclaimed that 
she came to console the afflicted in his slavery, and to lift 
from him the weight of the degradation w T hich was upon him. 
Then, the history of the Church began. You all know, my 
dear friends, how, five centuries after the Church was estab- 
lished, the barbarians — the Goths, the Yandals, the Alans, 
and all these terrible nations from the north, swept down over 
the Roman empire, and destroyed everything : broke up 
society ; reduced it to its first chaotic elements ; and slavery 
was the universal institution all the world over. Every 
nation had it. The captive that was taken in war lost his 
liberty, not for a day, but for ever. The man who was 
oppressed with debt was taken for his debt and sold into 
slavery. The Church of God alone, was able to meet these 
barbarians, to confront them, and to evangelize to them hei 
gospel of liberation ; and to soften, and gradually to dimin- 
ish, until at length, she all but destroyed the existence of 
this unjust slavery. The Church of God — the Catholic 
Church, was the only power that these barbaric nations 
' would respect. The Pope of Rome was the great upholder 
of the principles of liberty ; because liberty means nothing 
more nor less than the assertion of right for every man, and 
the omnipotence of the law, which insures him his right, and 
defines that right. And how did the Pope act ; and how did 
the Church carry out her mission ? My friends we find that 
from the fifth century, — from the very time that the Church 
began to be known and had commenced to make her influ- 
ence felt among the nations, — among the very first ordinances 
that she made, were some for the relief of tne slave. She 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



183 



commanded, for instance, under rain of censure, that no mas- 
ter was to put his slave to death ; and you may imagine 
under what depths of misery society was plunged, and from 
what a state of things the Catholic Church has saved the 
world, — when I tell you that one of the ordinances of a coun- 
cil in the sixth century was, that if any lady (now just imag- 
ine this to yourselves !) — being offended by any of her slaves, 
or vexed by them, put the slave to death, that she was to 
undergo several long years of public penance for the crime 
that she had committed. What a state of society it was, 
when a delicate lady, arraying herself, perhaps, for an even- 
ing meeting, — a ball, or a party, — with her maiden slaves 
around her, dressing her, adding ornament to ornament, — 
that if one of them made a slight mistake, the delicate lady 
was able to turn round, — as we read in the Pagan historians, 
and as Roman ladies did, — and thrust her ivory-hilted dagger 
intc the heart of her poor slave, striking her dead at her feet. 
The only power that was recognized on the earth, to make 
that lady responsible — the only power that she would listen 
to, — the only representative of the law that was thus to fling 
its protection over the unhappy slave, was the power of the 
mighty Church, that told that lady that if she committed 
herself to such actions as these, outside the Church's gates 
she should kneel, in sack-cloth and ashes ; that she should 
kneel far away from the altar and the sacrifice ; that she 
should kneel there until, after long years of weeping and pen- 
itence, as a public penitent, she was to be permitted to crawl 
into the Church, and take the place of the penitent nearest 
the door. 

And so, in like manner, we find the Church, in the pro- 
gress of ages, making laws, that if any slave oftended his mas- 
ter, and, if the master wished to punish him, then and there, 
by some terrible form of aggravated punishment, and if that 
slave fled from his master, there was only one place where he 
could find security, and that was the church. For the 
Church declared that the moment a slave crossed her door 
and entered into her sanctuary, that moment the master's 
hand was stayed, and the slave was out of his power, until 
the case was fairly tried, and proportionate and just punish- 
ment imposed, as would be imposed on any man who com- 
mitted the same offence. 

Again ; we find the same Church, in the course of ages 
imposing a threat of excommunication upon any man who 
should capture a manumitted or emancipated slave, and re- 
duce him to slavery again, Further on, we find the same 



184 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION 1 . 



Church making a law that when a bishop, or a cardinal, or 
a great ecclesiastic died, all those who were in servitude to 
him should be immediately freed. These were the freedmen 
of the Church, as they were called. 

But you may ask, why didn't she abolish slavery at once ? 
And this is the accusation that is made against the Catholic 
Church, even by such a man as Guizot, the great French 
statesman and philosopher ; who says — these are his words : 
" I admit, that the Catholic Church, in her action in her gen- 
ius, always tried to preach the subject of emancipation ; but 
why did she not do it at once ? " I answer, the Church of 
God is the only power upon earth which at all times has 
known how to do good, and to do it wisely and justly. It is 
not enough to do a good thing because it is good : it must be 
well done ; it must be wisely done ; there must be no injury 
accompanying the doing of it ; nor no injustice staining the 
act. The Church of God could not, from the very beginning, 
ever have emancipated without doing a grave injustice to the 
society which she would disturb, to the owners of these 
slaves against whom she might be accused of robbery ; but 
the greatest injustice of all to the poor slaves themselves, 
who were not prepared for the gift of freedom. And there- 
fore, taking her own time, proclaiming her principles, acting 
upon them strongly yet sweetly, and drawing to her every 
interest ; conciliating men's minds ; creating public opinion 
among society ; trying to save every man from injustice ; and 
in the meantime, preparing mankind by faith and by sanctity 
for the gift of freedom, — she labored slowly, patiently, but 
most efficaciously in the great work of emancipation. For, 
my friends, there are two injustices, and grave injustices, 
which may accompany this great act of emancipation. There 
is the injustice which may affect the whole of society, may 
break up public order, may ruin interests ; and that is the 
injustice which a sudden and a rash emancipation inflicts 
upon the society upon which it falls. For instance, as m 
Europe in the early middle ages, slaves who, according to 
St. Augustine, were enslaved, not from any inherent right of 
man over his fellow-man, but in punishment for their own 
sins, in virtue of the prescription of God, — these slaves 
formed a great portion of the public property. Nearly one- 
half of mankind were enslaved to the other. The conse- 
quence was that the disposition of property was affected by 
them, that the tillage and cultivation of the land depended 
upon them ; that in fact the status and condition of the half 
who owned the slaves would be affected ; so that by a sudden 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



185 



and rash emancipation, the freeman of to-day would become a 
slave, in the poverty and in the uncalled for privation, and the 
unexpected misery that would come upon him by the loss of 
all that he possessed in this world. Was that injustice to be 
done ! No, because it would defeat its own end. The end 
of all society is peace and happiness. The end of all society 
is concord and mutual straining to one end — each man help- 
ing his fellow-man ; and the Church was too wise to throw 
such an element of universal discord among all the other dis- 
sensions that were tearing the heart of the world in those 
days, to throw in the element of discord, and to set one half 
the world against the other. 

But far greater is the injustice which is done to the poor 
slave himself by a sudden, an unexpected and a sweeping 
emancipation. For, my friends, next to Divine grace and 
faith, the highest gift of God to man is freedom. Freedom ! 
sacred liberty ! — sacred liberty ! within these consecrated 
walls, — even as a priest I say, that sacred freedom is a high 
gift of God ; but the history of our race tells us that it is a 
gift that has at all times been most fatally abused ; and the 
poet says, with bitter truth, that at an early age he was 
left 

" Lord of himself — that heritage of woe." 

Liberty, — lordship over oneself — unfettered freedom is, in 
most cases, a "heritage of woe," and especially when a man 
does not understand what it means, and is not prepared for 
its legitimate exercise. What is liberty? that sacred word so 
often used, so frequently abused, so little understood? Ah! 
my friends, what is liberty? In our days men fall into two 
most fatal errors : they have a false idea of religious liberty, 
and they have a false idea of civil liberty. The false idea of 
religious liberty is, that it consists in unfettered freedom for 
every man to believe whatever he likes. A nation is said to 
have religious liberty when every man believes whatever no- 
tion of religion comes into his head ; and consequently there 
are as many sects as there are religions. Men say, " Grand ! 
glorious ! this is religious liberty ! " But yesterday there 
was only one faith in Italy, for instance ; to-day we hear 
men boasting : "Thirty thousand hearers; ten thousand 
preachers ;" and so on ; and in twenty years' time, if this goes 
on, we shall have Italy broken up into Quakers, and Shakers, 
and Baptists, and Anabaptists, and all sorts of religious sects. 
Is this religious liberty ? Men say it is. Well, if this be 
religious liberty, all I can say is that the definition that Christ 



186 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIONS". 



our Lord, gave of religious liberty is wrong, for He said: 
Truth is one, and only one : it cannot contradict itself. You 
know the truth, and have it ; and in that you shall find your 
freedom/' It will follow that the more any nation or people 
approach to unity of thought, they approach to liberty, 
provided that one thought represents the truth of Jesus 
Christ. 

Civil liberty is also misunderstood. Many imagine now- 
a -days that the essence of civil liberty is the power to rise 
up at any time and create a revolution — rise up against the 
rulers and governors — against the fixed form of constitu- 
tional law, — and upset everything. That is the idea, for 
instance — the popular idea, unfortunately — now in the minds 
of many in Europe. In France, for example, nearly every 
man that knows how to read and write has a copy of a con- 
stitution in his pocket, which he has drawn out himself, to 
be the future constitution of France ; and he is prepared to 
go out and stand on the barricades and fight for Ms constitu- 
tion, and kill his neighbor for it. The idea of liberty, too, 
which has taken possession of the minds of many, seems to 
lie in this — that every man can do as he likes, and what he 
likes. Ah! if this were brought home to us; if it were 
brought home to us that every man could do as he liked ; 
that we could be assaulted and assailed at every hand's turn ; 
that every man should go out with his life in his hand ; that 
there was no protection for a man against his neighbor who 
was stronger ; and any man who, boasting of his power, 
says : "I want your money, — I want your means, — I am able 
to take it, and I am at liberty to take it ; because liberty 
consists in every man doing as he likes : " how would you 
like this liberty, my friends? ISTo : the essence of liberty 
lies here : the essence of liberty lies in recognizing and defin- 
ing every man's right, no matter what he is, from the high- 
est to the lowest in the State. Let every man know his own 
rights, be they great or small, be they limited or otherwise ; 
let every man have the rights that are just and reasonable; 
let him know his rights ; don't keep him in ignorance of 
them ; define them for him by law, no matter what position 
he holds in society; and when every man's rights are defined 
and recognized, and incorporated in law, let that law be put 
up on high : put it, if you will, upon the very altar ; and let 
every man hi the State — president, king, emperor, general, 
soldier, civilian — let every man, high or low, bow down 
before the omnipotence and the supremacy of that law. Let 
that law be there to define every man's rights, and to secure 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



187 



them to him, and let every man know that as long as he 
keeps himself within the exercise of his own rights, as defined 
by law, no power can touch him, no man can infringe upon 
him. Leave him free in the exercise of these rights : that is 
liberty ; the supremacy of the law, the omnipotence of law, 
— the law which is the expression of matured reason and of 
authority, respecting and defining every man's rights. Far 
more free is the man who is only able to do this thing or that, 
but knows that he can do them, — that knows that these are 
his rights and no man can prevent him from exercising 
them, — than the man who has an undefined freedom, which is 
not preserved or secured to him by any form of defined law. 

This is civil liberty. And so it is as great a mistake to 
say, " I can do what I like ; therefore I am free; I have civil 
liberty," as to say, "I can believe what I like; therefore I 
have religious liberty." No, it is not true. Dogma,— the 
truth of God, — does not leave us at liberty. It appeals to us, 
and we are bound to open our minds to let into our intelligence 
the truth of God. Any man who refuses it commits a 
sin. We are not at liberty to refuse it. The law appeals 
to us; we. are not at liberty to disobey it The quintes- 
sence of civic freedom lies in obeying the law ; the quintes- 
sence of religious freedom lies in acknowledging the 
truth. 

And now, my friends, this being the case, I ask you what 
greater injustice can you do to a man than to give him that 
liberty, that unlimited freedom, without first telling him his 
rights, defining his rights, establishing those rights by laAV, 
and without teaching that man that he must respect the law 
that protects him, that he must move within the sphere or 
circle of his rights, and content himself in this. What greater 
injustice can you do to society or to a man himself, than to 
give him freedom without denning what his rights are ? In 
other words, is not the gift of liberty itself a misnomer ? Is 
it not simply an absurdity to say to a man, " You are free; " 
and that man does not know what is meant by the word free- 
dom ? Look at the history of emancipation, and will you not 
find this to be the case ? The States have emancipated just 
as the Church has emancipated ; but with this difference — 
that the Church prepared the slave before she gave him free- 
dom ; taught him his rights, taught him his responsibilities, 
taught him his duties ; and then taking the chains off his 
hands, said : " You are a free man. Respect your rights ; 
move in the sphere of your duties, and bow down before the 
law that has made you free." The State has not said this. 



188 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



A few years ago England emancipated the black population 
of Jamaica; — a sweeping emancipation. The negroes were 
not prepared for it ; they did not understand it. What was 
the first use they made of their liberty ? The first use that 
they made of their liberty was to fling aside the hoe, the reap- 
ing-hook, the sickle, the spade, every implement of labor 
and sit down idly, to famish and starve in the land. 

Now, among the duties of man, defined by every law, the 
first duty is labor, — work. The only respectable man in this 
world is the man who works. The idler is not a respectable 
man. If* he were seated upon the great Caesar's throne, and 
there he would be an idler, I would have no respect, but only 
contempt for him. This was the first use that the negro popu- 
lation of Jamaica made of their freedom. What was the 
consequence ? That their state to-day, after many years of 
emancipation, is one of absolute misery; while, during the 
time they were slaves they were living in comparative 
comfort. Because, small as the circle of their rights was, 
strictly defined as it was, ctill it had its duties : they knew 
their duties, they knew the law ; they were protected in the 
exercise of their duties ; and the consequence was they were 
a thriving people. Look to the Southern States of this 
"Union. You have emancipated your negro population, witli 
one sweeping act of emancipation. I need not tell you that 
by so doing (I do not wish to speak politics ; I do not wish to 
enter upon this question in any way that would be, perhaps, 
insolent in a stranger — but this I do say) — that in that 
sweeping emancipation, though you did what the world may 
call a grand and a glorious thing, you know well, gentlemen, 
how many you deprived of the very means of subsistence by 
it, and what misery and poverty you brought upon many 
families by it, and how completely for a time you shattered 
the framework of society by it. Have you benefitted the 
slave population by it ? — by this gift of freedom, — a glorious 
gift, a grand gift, provided that the man who receives it 
knows what it is; provided the man who receives it is 
prepared to receive it, and use it as he ought. But, either to 
the white man or the colored man the gift of freedom is a 
fatal gift unless he knows how to use it. Did you prepare 
these men for that freedom before you gave it to them ? Did 
you tell them that they should be as laborious as they w<?re in 
slavery? that labor was the first duty of every man r Did 
you tell them that they were to respect the rights of their 
fellow-men, to whom, slaves yesterday, they are made equals 
to-day? Did you tell them that they were not to indulge in 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



189 



vain, idle, dreams of becoming a privileged class intheland,to 
become gentlemen, and govern and rule their fellow-men to 
whom the law only made them constitutionally and politically 
equal ? Did you tell them that they were not to attempt 
instantly, forcibly, to overstep certain barriers that the God 
of nature set between them ; but that they were to respect the 
race that manumitted and emancipated them. I fear you did 
not. I have evidence of it. What use have they made of this gift 
of freedom? Ah! children as they were, though grown into 
the fulness of material manhood, — children as they were, 
without education without knowledge, — what use could they 
make of their freedom ! What use do you and I make of 
our freedom? we who are born free, we whose education and 
everything surrounding us from our infancy, all tend to 
make us respect and use well that freedom. Is there that 
purity, that self-respect, that manly restraint over a man's 
passions, — is there that assertion of the dominion of the soul 
over the inferior nature stamped upon the Christian society 
and the white society of the world to-day, that would lead 
them to imagine that it is so easy for a poor child of slavery 
to enter into the fulness of his freedom? I fear not. Well, 
my friends, still they are there before us. The dreams of the 
political economist will not teach them to use their freedom. 
The vain, ambitious, and I will add, impious purposes and 
theories propounded by those who would insinuate that the 
colored man was emancipated for the purpose of a com- 
mingling of races, will not teach them to use their 
freedom. The ambitious hopes held out of ascendancy before 
them will not teach them to use their freedom. The political 
parties that would make use of them for their own ends will 
never teach them to use their freedom. You have emanci- 
pated them; and I deny that they are free. I say that they 
are slaves. You have emancipated them. Tell me, what 
religious freedom have you given them ? You have put an 
open Bible into the hand of a man who only learned to read 
yesterday, and you have told him with bitter sarcasm to go 
and find the truth of God in a book that has puzzled the great- 
est and wisest of the earth's philosophers. You have sent him 
in search of religion in a book that has been quoted by every 
false teacher from the day that it was written, by prostituting 
that sacred inspired word, and twisting it to lend a color to 
his arguments. You have sent teachers to them, teachers who 
began their lesson, began their teaching, by declaring that, 
after they had labored all day, they might have been mis- 
taken all through ; and that they had no fixed, immutable 



190 



THE CATHOLIC iQSSIOX. 



truths to give to the poor emancipated mind. You know it. 
What religious freedom have you given them? Have you 
touched their hearts vith grace? You have given them, 
indeed, forms of religion, which you boast are suited to them, 
because you allow these over-grown, simple children to bel- 
low and to cry out what seems to be the word of praise and 
of faith. 

Ah, my friends, it is not this corporeal exercise that will 
purify their hearts, strengthen their souls, subdue their 
passions, and make them first of all, respect themselves and 
then respect their fellow-citizens of the land. You have 
emancipated them, but you have not freed them. They shall 
be free only in the day when these poor darkened intelligen- 
ces shall have been led into the full light of God's know- 
ledge, and when the strong animal passions of a race that, 
from whatever cause it be, seems to have more of the ani- 
mal than many other races of mankind ; when their strong- 
passions are subdued, their hearts purified, their souls cleans- 
ed, graces received to be prized and to be retained ; — then, 
and only then, will you have emancipated the negro. You 
have not done it as yet. But it is the Church's work to do 
it. It is her mission and her duty. She knows that He who 
came and died upon the cross, died not only for you but for 
these children of the mid-day sun. She knows that every 
soul of these colored people is as dear to the heart of God 
as the proudest and the best, the most learned and the most 
refined among you. She knows that if she can only make 
a truly faithful Catholic Christian out of the humblest of 
these children of the desert, that she will have made some- 
thing more noble, — grander and greater — than the best 
among you, if you be sinners ; and she, therefore, sends to 
them her clergy, her consecrated children — priests and nuns. 
She says to the noblest and the best in the land : " Arise, go 
forth from house and home, from father and friends ; go 
seek a strange land and strange people ; go in among 
them ; go seek the toil and the burning heat and the burden 
of the day ; go seek the man whom many men despise ; kneel 
down at his feet and offer him Jesus Christ." We have 
been told by a high authority that this is an act of justice 
which England offers — an act of reparation which Catholic 
England offers to America ; for, great as has been the crisis 
of the late war, the slavery which was in America, — the 
highest ecclesiastical authority in England tells us, sanctioned 
by the voice of history, — has not been your creation, my 
American friends : it was England's creation. It was forced 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



191 



upon you ; and from having begun it became a necessity. 
And therefore England to-day sends her children ; and they 
come with humility, but with earnestness and zeal, and they 
say to you — to you, Catholics, — to you many among you — 
perhaps a vast majority among you — of Irish parentage or 
Irish descent, — she says to you, " Children of a faithful 
nation, children of a race that has always been intellectual 
enough to recognize the one truth, keen enough to know its 
value, energetic enough to grasp it with a firm hand,— lovers 
as you have been of freedom, worshippers at the shrine of 
your religious and your national liberty, — she asks you, 
children of a race of doctors, of martyrs, of apostles, to lend 
a helping hand to the Catholic Church to-day, and to aid her 
to emancipate truly those who have obtained only freedom in 
name, and to complete that work which can only be done by 
a touch of the hand of Jesus Christ. 

Your presence here this evening expresses your sympathy 
with the high and noble purpose that has brought these chil- 
dren, the consecrated ones of the Church of God, to this coun- 
try ; and they appeal to you, through me : — and they have 
a right to appeal to you, through me, and I have a right to 
speak to you in this cause of freedom : for my brother, wear- 
ing this same habit, the venerable and holy Bartholomew Las 
Casas, the first Dominican that ever landed in America, in the 
very train of Christopher Columbus himself, — was the first 
man that raised his voice to proclaim to the poor Indian the 
birthright of that higher freedom that consists in the knowl- 
edge and the grace of Jesus Christ. We only ask you to 
help us to diffuse that knowledge and that grace — that knowl- 
edge which is the freedom of the intellect — that grace which 
is the freedom of the will, and without which double freedom 
there is no emancipation ; for the chains may fall from the 
hand, but the chain is still riveted upon the soul. Freedom 
is a sacred thing ; but like every sacred thing, it must be 
seated in the soul of man. Bodily freedom is as nothing un- 
less the soul be emancipated by the holy Church of God. 
Your presence here this evening attests your sympathy with 
this great work ; and, O my friends, as you have contributed 
materially, I ask you to contribute also intellectually and 
spiritually — intellectually by the sympathy of your intel- 
ligence with the labor of those holy priests, and spiritually by 
praying to God, who came to emancipate the world, that He 
might make perfect the weak and inefiicient action of man- 
kind and of the State, by pouring forth His spirit of light and 
grace among these poor children and strangers who are in 
the land. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered on Sunday, May 5, by the Rev FatjteB 
Burke, in St. Joseph's Church, Brooklyn.] 

"the confessional : its effect on society." 



Dearly Beloved Brethren : Among the things that were 
prophesied concerning our Lord and Saviour, there was this 
said of Him — that He would be an object of wonder to men : 
" Vocabitur adrriiraMMs" " He shall be called," says the pro- 
phet, " Wonderful." He came ; and, in signs and miracles, 
and many glorious deeds, He excited the wonder of mankind ; 
but never so much as when they heard from His lips such 
words as these : " Thy sins are forgiven thee," — spoken to 
the sinner. They were astonished at His wisdom ; they were 
astonished at His miracles ; but it was only when He said to 
the paralytic man : " Thy sins are forgiven thee," and to the 
Magdalene : " Arise, go in peace : all is forgiven thee," — it 
was only then that the Pharisees absolutely refused to believe. 
Their wonder carried them even into incredulity ; and they 
said among themselves, and to each other : " How can this 
be?" 

As it was with our Divine Lord, so it is with the action 
of His Holy Church with regard to sinners. The world 
beholds her as Christ, our Lord established her — in all her 
spiritual loveliness and beauty — in majesty, in unity, in truth- 
fulness and in power. Men are obliged to acknowledge all 
the beautiful things that dwell in the Church. Some reluc- 
tantly, others with apparent joy, bear witness to the fair order 
of mercy and charity in her. And when they see her best 
and her holiest sitting down in the hospitals and in orphan- 
ages, attending the poor, or following the soldier to the bat- 
tle-field, they fill the world with praise of this wonderful 
mercy which is so organized in the Catholic Church. When 
they see eight hundred of her Bishops, meeting in Council, 
and all hearing the word of one man, and before that one 
bowing down as before the voice of God, — they bear willing 
testimony to the wonderful unity of faith which is in the 
Church. When they contemplate her priesthood, consecrated 
to God, and devoted to the people, they give loud and cheer- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



193 



ful testimony to the devotedness which exists in t'ne Catholic 
Church. But there is one thing, — just like the Pharisees with 
our Lord, — there is one thing that they icill not admit ; and 
they are, perpetually, in regard to that one thing, repeating 
the'old word of the Pharisees : " Who is this that says he 
can remit sin ?" and " How can this be ?" " Who is this man 
that even forgives, or pretends to forgive, sin ?" 

And so, over and over again, we meet those who say : 
" We admire the strength of your faith ; we admire the piety 
of your worship ; we admire the wonderful energy of your 
organization; we admire your ancient traditions; but don't 
speak to us of confession ! " Whenever the confessional is 
abused, they listen to the abuse of it with greedy ears. No 
man is more popular than the man who pretends to " unmask 
confession ! " He is " honest ! " he is " sincere ! " he is " act- 
ing up to his convictions ! " There must be something fear- 
ful, something terrible, in that assumption of power by which 
the Church pretends to deal with sinners, and to cleanse them 
from their sin. Yet, my friends, reflect : certain it is, that 
the mission for which the Eternal Son of God came down 
from Heaven to earth was to take away sin ; " that where 
sin abounded grace might abound still more." Certain it is, 
that it was for sinners He came, and for their sins He died. 
Kow, the action of Christ upon sinners and upon sin, was 
either to the total and entire destruction of sin, or only to 
the remedying of sin. Which of these was it ? Did His suf- 
ferings and His death totally and entirely destroy sin ? He 
might have done it. Did He put an end to sin ? Alas, no ! 
It was not the design of His wisdom. With sorrowing voice, 
He, himself, declared that when He had died and gone to 
the place of His glory, sin would still remain. " It is neces- 
sary," He said, "that scandal should be." If, then, this death 
and suffering of our Lord, and the mission of Christ our 
Lord, was not to the total destruction of sin, the mechanical 
and entire expulsion of all evil from this world, nothing re- 
mains but to say, still He came to remedy sin, to deal with 
sin wherever he found it, to deal with it in each successive 
generation. And this is the truth ; for, Christ our Lord, 
knowing, and foreknowing, that sin should be, provided a 
lasting remedy for the lasting evil. And, therefore, calling 
to Him his Apostles, He said : " I am come, that where sin 
abounded, grace might abound still more." Therefore did 
Christ suffer ; that the body of sin might be broken and 
destroyed in each successive generation. " The Father sent 
me," He says, " that where sin abounded grace might abound 
9 



194 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



still more." " Again, I say unto yon, that even as the Father 
sent me, so do I send you." Then breathing upon His Apos- 
tles, He said: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost ; whose sins ye 
shall forgive they are forgiven them : and whose sins ye shall 
retain they are retained." That moment, — at the breathing 
of the Son of God, — the power that was in Him was commu- 
nicated to His Apostles, that, in His power, and in His 
strength, and in His grace, and in His action, they might 
absolve from sin, and cleanse the soul of sin. 

Behold, then how Christ, our Lord, clearly and emphati- 
cally embodied His action in the Church, and gave to the 
Church to do unto the end of time, what He came to do upon 
the earth, viz., to deal with sin and with sinners, and to say 
to every weeping and contrite one, no matter how great the 
burden of his sin: "Arise; depart in peace ; thy sin is for- 
given thee ! " Even those who deny to the Church the power 
of forgiving sin, admit that the Apostles did it. They cannot 
deny that the Apostles had it, without denying the very words 
of Christ : " Whose sins ye shall forgive they are forgiven." 
And yet, while they admit that the Apostles had it, strange to 
say, they imagine that the mysterious power died with the 
Apostles. JSTo w, let us take up this theory. Let us reflect for 
a moment upon this foolish imagination, that the power to for- 
give sin died with the Apostles. The action of Christ, I 
repeat again, — the mission of Christ was to deal with sin and 
with sinners. He gave that power, undoubtedly, to his Apos- 
tles : and I assert that if that power died with John, the 
last of the twelve, the action and the mission of Christ came 
to an end. It was absolutely necessary to acknowledge either 
that the power was transmitted to the Apostles from their 
successors in the priesthood, as they themselves had received 
it from Christ, or to confess that the action of the Son of God, 
our Redeemer, not being utterly destructive of sin, but only 
remedial — that that action must have ceased entirely when 
the last of the Apostles died, and that there was an end of all 
hope of pardon for sinners. Can you imagine this ? Did He 
come only to redeem the generation that had crucified him ! 
Did He come only to redeem and to provide a remedy for the 
few generations that lasted as long as one of the Apostles 
was upon the earth ? Oh, no ! But He declared that as the 
Redeemer from everlasting was his name at the beginning so, 
until the end, He should be with his Church in the fulness of 
His power — in the greatness of the outpouring of His grace. 
"I am with you," He says, "all days, even to the consumma- 
tion of the world." " And therefore," says St. Paul, "He is 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



19o 



Jesus Christ, the anointed Saviour ! " — the same Saviour to- 
day as eighteen hundred years ago, through His Church •— - 
yesterday, and to-day the same : and for ever. A truth ! — 
fact ! — we have it recorded in the Scriptures. That the Apos- 
tles had the power of transmitting all that they received from 
Christ to their successor is evident from one simple fact that 
is not sufficiently meditated upon by those who deny it. 
Christ, our Lord, spoke to the original twelve. Judas was 
among them when He called them to be Apostles. J udas pre- 
varicated ; betrayed his Master; fell from his place of glory, 
even as Lucifer fell from his high throne in Heaven ; and then 
there was only eleven left. What did they do ? They chose 
one man from out the seventy-two disciples, — His name was 
Matthias, — good and holy ; — and they took this man, — having 
laid their hands upon him, — into the number of the Twelve 
Apostles, and he became even as they were. Everything 
that they could do he received the power to do. From whom ? 
From Christ? Christ was already ascended into Heaven. 
From whom then ! From the Apostles themselves. Think 
you, my brethren, that if they had not the power of trans- 
mitting all that they had received from Christ, they would 
have chosen a man and made him an Apostle ? But we have 
this upon the authority of Scripture. What, therefore, they 
were able to do for Matthias they were able to do for all their 
successors in the priesthood and in the episcopate. And so* 
the glorious tradition was handed down the stream; for all 
that began with Jesus Christ, — that flowed from Him through 
Peter, James, John, and the others, — flows to-day in the sa- 
cred channels of the priesthood. And that stream is a two- 
fold stream, viz, pure undiluted doctrine, as true as the very 
Word of God, because it is the Word of God — never to be 
polluted by the least error ; and, side by side with that stream 
of doctrine, the waters of divine grace; the sacramental 
power to heal by the touch of sanctity ; by the application of 
the grace of Jesus Christ in the sacraments. These remained 
principally, as far as regards sinners, in the sacrament of 
Baptism and in the sacrament of the Eucharist. 

It is clear, then, dearly beloved, that this was necessary in 
order that the mission and action of the Son of God, as 
Redeemer of the world, falling upon sinners, touching them, 
and cleansing them should continue in the Church. This was 
prophesied clearly by him who said : " On that day there 
shall be a sign unto the house of David, and unto the 
dwellers in Jerusalem ; a fountain of waters for cleansing the 
sinner and the unclean." That sacramental fountain springs 
forth from the Church in the Sacrament of Penance. 



196 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Now, "before we pass to consider the action of this sacra- 
ment upon society, consider it first viewed by the Almighty 
God, and in the wonderful manifestation of the heart and the 
hand of Jesus Christ. When the Son of God came down 
from Heaven to redeem the world, He came with three 
glorious attributes, which He was bound to preserve, even in 
the action of His redemption, because He was God. These 
were Mercy, Power and Justice. The justice of the Eternal 
Father demanded that His Own Divine Son, who, alone, 
could pay man's debt, should come down from Heaven and 
pay that debt in his blood. The justice of the Son of God in 
relation to His Heavenly Father, made Him come down from 
Heaven and pay, in the shedding of that blood, the 
all-sufficient price for all the souls of mankind. The justice 
of the Eternal Father demanded that as He had been out- 
raged in every attribute of His power and dignity by the 
man, Adam. — so by a man — a true man, — that honor, and 
glory, and dignity should be restored to Him; and the justice 
of the Eternal Word brought that uncreated God from 
Heaven, that, becoming true man, — the Son of Man, — He 
might be able to pay in that sacred humanity, and by the 
shedding of that blood, for the souls of mankind. Thus we 
see how the justice of God came forth for the world's 
redemption. Secondly the Mercy of God is seen, — for, Oh 
dearly beloved brethren, — when we have abandoned the 
Almighty God, ungrateful for all that He has conferred upon 
us, He might have left us fallen, only a God-forsaken race; 
He might have turned away from the first sinner upon earth 
as He turned away from the first sinner in Heaven, so as 
never to look with mercy upon his face again. We see, even 
in the height of His Majesty, the awfulness of His great- 
ness and His justice. But no ! God looked upon the fallen 
race with eyes of pity, with eyes of infinite compassion and 
of mercy ; and on the first day of His anger, He remembered 
this pity and this mercy ; for, after having cursed Adam for 
His sin, and having laid His curse upon the earth in the 
work of Adam, then did He unfold the plan of His redemp- 
tion ; and to the serpent He said : " Therefore, the woman, 
and the woman's seed shall crush thy head." In this we 
behold the power of God. "For," says St. Augustine, "the 
power of God is measured in our regard by the greatest of 
His works." Now, the greatest work of God is the 
redemption of mankind ; and the greatest work it ever 
entered into the mind of God to conceive, or into the hand 
of God to execute, was, God made man in our Saviour, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



197 



Christ. This was the greatest of all God's works. Compared 
with this creature — the Son of Mary: for in his humanity He 
was a creature — a man ; compared with Him in the ineffable 
union of God and man, of two natures in one person, every- 
thing else that God made, every other power that he 
ever showed or exercised, vanishes as if it was nothing ; and 
Christ our Lord, God and man, looms forth, filling heaven 
and earth as the greatest of all God's works. So in like man- 
ner in the dealings of Christ our Lord with sinners, He was 
careful to preserve the same three attributes of His Divinity. 
His power He showed forth in the remission of their sins; 
His mercy He showed forth in turning to them and spurning 
them not from Him ; His justice He showed forth, for never did 
He absolve a sinner from his sin without cautioning that 
sinner, lest he might return to that sin again, and something 
far more terrible should fall upon him. 

And now, when we pass from the action of Christ to His 
Church, what do we find? We find, dearly beloved breth- 
ren, in all the works of God in His Church, in all her sacra- 
ments, a union of the same attributes. For, nowhere, in no 
sacrament, in no action of God, do we find power and mercy 
so magnificently shown forth, and so wonderfully blended 
into one act, as in the act by which the sinner is saved and 
absolved from his sin. First of all, consider the power of 
God. Almighty God showed His omnipotence, first of all, 
in the creation. He spoke over the darkness, and the void 
of space, and He said ; " Let there be light," and light was 
made in an instant. The sun shone forth in the heavens, 
and the moon caught up her reflected glory from him. The 
stars sprang forth like clustering gems in the firmament 
newly created, and the whole world was flooded with the 
blessed light which sprang into existence at the word of 
God. Then followed the same imperative omnipotent com- 
mand — the same fiat — and at the sound of the expression of 
God's will life came out of Death, as light out of darkness ; 
beauty out of chaos ; order out of disorder; and all the 
series of worlds took up their position in their respective 
places in creation, and began that hymn of harmony and 
praise which has resounded before Him for six thousand 
years. How great, how wonderful is the word that God 
spoke, and by which He could effect such great things ! Yet 
St. Augustine tells us that the words by which the priest 
says to the sinner, " I absolve thee in the name of the 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," and which, at their sound, 
cleanse that sinner's soul from all his sins, bring him forth 



198 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



from out the grave — bring him" forth from out the darkness 
of his sin, into the light of God's grace : from defilement 
into purity ; from death into life ; that that word is simply, 
infinitely more powerful than the word (the fiat)^ by which 
Almighty God created the world. Infinitely more powerful, 
and why ? Because when God, in the beginning of creation, 
stood, as it were, upon the threshold of heaven ; and from 
heaven's brightness sent forth the word, there was nothing 
in that void that lay before God, nothing in that chaotic 
space over which His word was sped that could resist 
the action of His word. There was nothing there. He 
made all things out of nothing ; but the original noth- 
ingness, therefore could not resist the action of God. Nor 
is there in heaven, nor upon the earth, nor in hell, any- 
thing that can resist the action of God, except one thing ; 
and that one thing is the obstinate will, and the perverse 
heart of the sinner. The will of man alone can say to the 
Almighty God, " Omnipotence, I defy thee ! " And why ? It 
is not that God could not, if He so willed it, annihilate that 
will ; but He does not will it. It is because the Almighty 
God, by an eternal law, respects that freedom of man's will, 
so that if that will resist Him freely, Omnipotence itself is 
powerless before that will. Such being the decree of the 
law of the will of man, the heart of man alone, the will of 
man alone, can offer such an obstacle to the Almighty God's 
action. Even in his Omnipotent power, God must yield, 
because He cannot gain a victory without destroying that 
freedom which He has sworn, by an eternal law, to respeGt. 

Now, when a man commits sin, — falls from one sin into 
another : when he becomes a drunkard, or an impure man, 
or a blasphemer, or in any other way hands over his soul 
to the devil, then his will is opposed to God, — his heart 
turned against God. And how can the Almighty God con- 
vert that man, whose will is opposed to Him, and the free- 
dom of whose will He is bound to respect ? Here comes in 
the wonderful action of God's wisdom united to His omnipo- 
tence. He will not say to that sinner, " You must be con- 
verted ; " He will not say it, because if He said it, that con- 
versation would not be free, would not be worthy in man, 
nor could it be deserving of the favor and acceptance of 
Almighty God. The freedom that is in God essentially He 
has reflected on man, and he that is saved must be saved by 
a free cooperation with God's grace ; and he that is damned 
goes down to hell of his own free will. Therefore, the Lord 
says : " Thy pride is in thyself." Here is the difficulty, then 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



109 



that the mind of God alone, the wisdom of God alone, united 
to His omnipotence can solve. Here is a man whose will is 
opposed to God. As long as that will is opposed to God, 
Almighty God can never have mercy on that man. And yet 
God can, in virtue of His own eternal laws, force that will to 
relinquish its opposition to Him. Therefore, by His graces, by 
His wonderful attractive powers, He awakens in that sinner's 
soul the first feelings of love. He puts before the sinner's 
eyes, first, the hideous yet true lineaments of sin. He excites 
in the sinner's heart the first feelings of remorse and of lone- 
liness at being separated from God. He puts into the sin- 
ner's cup of pleasure the little drop that embitters it some- 
what to his own spiritual taste ; and he reminds him how 
sweet it was to have loved the Lord, his God. He thunders 
in that sinner's ears the announcement of his judgments ; 
He shakes that sinner's soul with the first tremblings of that 
holy fear which is the beginning of wisdom. With a merci- 
ful hand He opens the vision of hell, and shows to that sin- 
ner's startled glance the lowest abode of the everlasting 
dwelling-place of the enemies of God. And thus, by a thous- 
and powerful graces, sweetly, yet strongly, does he bring 
that sinner's will around, until at length the impediment is 
removed, and the man comes freely, not forced, but drawn 
and attracted, — not coerced at all, yet coming in spite of 
himself — in spite of himself, yet freely — and — (mystery of the 
omnipotence of divine grace, and of the wonderful respect 
of God's omnipotence for the freedom of man) — he comes 
and surrenders himself to God. Then, and only then, can 
the Almighty God absolve him from his sin. Consider how 
great is the obstacle that has to be removed from that sin- 
ner's soul before the omnipotent God can free him from his 
sin ! There is there a will opposed to God. If all the angels 
in heaven, if all the powers in heaven and upon earth, 
strained themselves to change that will, their action would 
be simply impotence before it ; so tremendous is the law that 
preserves the perfect freedom of man's will for good or for evil. 

We can again reflect upon the power of God as shown in 
His punishment of sin ; for this is the second great feature of 
His omnipotence, when it comes out in all the rigors of His 
justice. Oh, how terrible is this consideration, that, while 
we are here, peacefully assembled around this holy altar, 
there is, somewhere or other, in the creation of God, the vast, 
the terrible prison of hell, with its millions on millions of un- 
happy inmates, and its flames, roaring, sweeping, devouring, 
and yet not consuming ; — that, somewhere or other, the air is 



200 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



filled with the cry, — the spiritual cry, — of the imprisoned souls, 
and reprobate angels of God, dashing in all their wild and 
impotent rage against those bars that shall never permit them 
to go forth ; that there is enkindled by the breath of an 
angry God a fire that shall never be extinguished : and there, 
for all eternity, the hand of God in all its omnipotence will 
fall with all the weight of its unsatisfied vengeance of fire ! 
Terrible, terrible it is to think upon the despair that, looking 
forward to an endless eternity, sees no ray of hope, no moment 
of mitigation of the terrible punishments of the soul and of 
the body there ! Yet, if you reflect upon it, what is more 
natural than that the sinner, dying in his sins, should go 
down to hell ! Where can he go ? He cannot go to heaven, 
with all his sins upon him. He died the enemy of God. He 
died, with his free will turned away from God. He died with 
the hatred of God in his heart, because of the presence of sin. 
Is this the man you would introduce into the Divine presence ? 
Is it on those lips, accustomed to blasphemy, that you would 
place the ringing canticle of praise ! He has no idea of the 
f oys of Heaven, for they are spiritual ; and this man's only 
idea or notion of delight was in gross, carnal sensuality. He 
has no idea, of the Lord of Heaven ; for all his lifetime he 
spake the language of hell, — cursing and blaspheming 
has no idea of the God of Heaven ; for, all his lifetime, he 
served the demon of his own passions and his own evil incli- 
nations. There is nothing in him attuned with Heaven. It 
would be violence offered to him to send him to Heaven and 
to make him enter into the joys of God. No; it is natural 
that he should go down into the cess-pool of hell ; either his 
sin must leave him, or else that sin, abiding upon his soul 
must leave him under the brand of God's vengeance. 

What is more natural, my friends, than the idea of the 
water flowing from the little fountain on the mountain's 
summit, — flowing onward in its little bed, falling now over 
one rock and then over another, receiving its various 
tributaries as it flows along, and growing in size, until at 
length, it becomes a little river in the lower plains. Falling 
from one cascade into another, it finds the deep valley in the 
open country, and there sweeps into the mighty river, 
spanned by great bridges, passing through great towns, 
supporting upon its bosom mighty ships of war; until at 
length, turbulent, and with a thousand impurities, it falls 
rapidly into the deep, wild ocean. This is all natural. That 
a man should stand upon that river's side and say : 



' Flow on, thou shining river 1 " 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



201 



is natural. But that a man should be able to stand in the 
mid-tide of that mighty stream, and with his hands to push 
it back against its course; to make it flow up through the 
upper lands, and up to the higher levels; to make it flow 
upwards against the cataract; to bring it up purifying it a/ 
he goes, until, at length, from the turbulent, impure an^ 
muddy stream, he brings it back again over the rocks, until 
pure as crystal it arrives at its source — and empties into tha* 
source; this would be achievement ; this would be power. Am* 
what this would be is just what the omnipotence of God does 
here in the confessional, as compared with His action in permit* 
ting the damned to go down into hell. That God should permit 
the sinner to go down into hell, and that He should visit him 
there with His everlasting punishment, is natural and neces- 
sary, and shows the power God possesses, and need excite no 
astonishment. But that the Almighty God should stop the 
sinner in his mad career of sin; that He should make him 
stand while he was hurrying on through every channel of 
impurity, and pride, and avarice, and dishonesty, gathering 
every element of corruption and defilement as he went along, 
swelling forth in the tide of his iniquity as he was nearing 
the great ocean of hell — that God should stop him, send him 
back again into the halls of memory, and there through the 
pure stream of His life, cleanse him from his impurity and sin 
as he went along, until, at length, he brought him back to the 
pure, limpid fountain-head of his baptismal innocence, — this 
is the wonder. Here shines the omnipotence of God. And 
this is precisely the act which He does when He takes the 
sinner and cleanses him from his sin ! 

But how wonderfully are his love and mercy blended in 
this action of Christ. We suppose that the subject — the very 
subject of His omnipotence — is the sinner, — a man who has 
violated, perhaps, the most essential and important of God's 
laws ; a man who may have the blood of the innocent on hi? 
red-stained hand ; a man from whose soul every vestige of 
divine remembrance and of spiritual aspiration may have 
departed, because of his impurity ; a man who may have 
committed sins worse even than those that brought the del- 
uge of fire from Heaven on the cities of Pentapolis ; a man 
who may have liked only to devote himself to every most 
wicked and diabolical purpose, until he has frittered into 
pieces and broken every one of God's holy laws and com- 
mands, — that man comes and stands before this enraged and 
offended God, — stands before this God who has a hell pre- 
pared for him, — stands before this God whose goodness he 
9* 



202 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



has despised, whose grace lie has trampled upon, — whose 
blood he has wasted away, whose every attribute he has out- 
raged ; — and he asks that God to deal with him ! He comes 
as a criminal ; and, to that God, he says : " Lord ! here I 
am ! There is not in nether hell one so bad as I. There is 
no record, in the annals of Thy dealings with sinners, of any 
sinner so terrible as I have been. And, now, I wish to enter 
with Thee into judgment ! " Contrast the two ! If that man 
had violated the laws of this world, as he has violated the 
laws of God ; if that man had insulted human society as he 
has insulted the Lord Jesus Christ ; if that man's iniquities 
were only taken cognizance of by an earthly tribunal, see 
how they would deal with him ! He would be dragged from 
his house, perhaps in the noonday, by the rough officers of 
justice ; he would be taken publicly through the streets of the 
city ; every eye looking at him curiously ; every hand point- 
ing at him as the great criminal — the man who committed 
such a murder — the man who did such and such wicked 
things. He would be flung into a dark dungeon, in a prison, 
and after days and days of waiting and anxiety, he would, 
be brought again into the open court, and the whole world 
called on to hear the testimony of his crime, and to behold 
his shame, Oh, no feeling of his would be spared ! He 
would not be allowed to shrink into a corner of that court 
there to hide his guilty head. ISTo, but he must stand forth 
and confront the witnesses who depose against him, and 
quietly and calmly swear away his life's blood. He must be 
exposed to the heartless jeers and inquiring gaze of the world, 
that is so unsympathizing. He may be, perhaps, on his 
transit from the court house to the prison, exposed to the 
groans and the hisses of the multitude. TV hen he is found 
guilty and his crime is brought upon him, then comes the 
awful moment. A judge, in solemn dignity, tells him that 
that his life is forfeit, and that he must die a death of public 
infamy and ignominy to expiate his crime. Thus does the 
world deal with its criminals. But if this criminal of whom 
I speak, — if he appears before the Son of God, and says, 
"Saviour, Judge; let us enter into judgment," Christ 
takes him by the hand, and He warns off the crowd. Christ 
lakes him and brings him into a secret tribunal; calls no 
witnesses against him ; allows no finger of shame to be 
pointed at him; listens to what he has to say against him- 
self ; He says : " Speak, my son, and speak freely ! " He 
speaks his deeds of shame, it is true, in the ears of a man. 
That man is there as the representative of the Lord Jesus 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



203 



Christ, whose mercy he is about to administer. He hears the 
whispered word. It must not be heard by the Angel of 
Mercy who is there, but only by the sinner and the priest of 
Jesus Christ. That word falls upon the priest's ear; for a 
moment it enters into his mind, and in a moment it passes 
away. Just as a little child, on a calm summer evening, 
might take a pebble and fling it into the bosom of a deep, 
still, placid lake; for an instant there is a ripple on the face 
of the water ; there is a little circlet of waves ; presently 
these die away, the waves close, and the pebble is lost for 
ever. No human eye shall see it again. So, for an instant, 
the sound of the sinners voice makes but a ripple upon 
the ear of the priest, thrills for an instant on the deli- 
cate tympanum, and passes from that into the unfathomable 
ocean of the merciful heart of Jesus Christ. The waters 
of Christ's mercy close over it ; and that sin is gone — "gone 
for ever." Not eye of angel, not eye of man nor eye of God 
at the hour of judgment, shall ever look upon it again ; for 
the blood of Jesus Christ has fallen upon it and washed it 
away. How little it costs the priest to say, " I absolve you 
in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost" — these three 
words ! How little it costs the sinner ! Scarcely a humilia- 
tion ! If indeed, a man had to proclaim his confession, and 
make it publicly; if a man had to make it before the assembly 
of the faithful, — if a man had to make it on a Sunday morn- 
ing before all the people, as they were crowding into Mass ; 
even then, if such a confession would obtain pardon for me, 
great God, would it not be a great gift to be able to purchase 
such a grace, even with such, confession, even at the ruin of 
my character — even with all the ignominy and contumely 
that I would sustain at my public confession ! It would be 
cheap considering what I got in return. If the law of 
Almighty God said to the sinner : " I will bring thee to the 
stake, — and only at the last moment, when the last drop of 
life's blood is coming from that broken heart, — then, and only 
then, will I absolve thee ! " — would it not be cheaply pur- 
chased — this pardon of God, this grace of God, this eternity 
of God's joy in Heaven — even by the rendering of the last 
drop of our blood ! But no ! Full of love, full of commiser- 
ation, Christ our Lord came to us with mercy, sparing every 
feeling of the sinner, making every difficult thing smooth, 
trying to anticipate, by the sweetness of His mercy, all the 
humiliation, and all the pain, shrouding all under that wonder- 
ful veil of secrecy which has never for an instant been 
rent since the Church was first founded : and in the end 



204 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



it is the only tribunal where, when a man is found 
guilty, the only sentence pronounced on him is one of acquit- 
tal. Iq other tribunals, when a man is found guilty," he 
receives his punishment. In the tribunal of penitence, all 
a man has to say is : Oh, of these am I guilty before my God; 
oh, my God, with sorrow I confess them ! " The only sen- 
tence is : "You are acquitted! Go, go in peace!" No 
vestige of sin — no stain of your iniquity is upon you ! The 
sin is gone, and the terrible curse that was upon your soul is 
changed into a blessing ! The angel-guardian that accom- 
panied the sinner to the door of the confessional awaits with- 
out, even as the Magdalene waited beside the tomb, while the 
body of our Lord lay there. For even as the angels, when 
the midnight hour of the Resurrection came, beheld a glorious 
figure rise from that tomb, and flung out their hearts and 
voices in adoration of the risen Saviour, from whom every 
wound and every deformity had disappeared ; so the angel- 
guardian waiting prayerfully, sorrowfully, outside the confes- 
sional, turns, for an instant, nearer when that door opens, and 
rejoices he beholds the man, who went in covered with sin, 
come forth as pure as that angel himself. The man who went 
in loaded with crimes comes forth with the blessing of the 
Eternal God, shining with the characters of immortal light 
upon his forehead; the man who went in dead and buried in 
his sin, has heard, within that secret tribunal, the voice which 
said : " Lazarus, come forth ! " And he has risen and come 
forth; and the angel-guardian is astonished at the change 
and the brightness on him. Was it not so ? Was there not 
a sad angel following with reluctant and distant steps, the 
woman that flaunted through the streets of Jerusalem — the 
Magdalene, with her flowing robes, and her outstretched neck 
of pride ; — was there not an angel that knew her m the day 
of her innocence, and was now stricken with misery to behold 
so much shame ? Oh, but when that angel saw her as she 
rose from the feet of Jesus Christ that she had washed with 
her tears, — oh, when that angel saw her as she rose, with the 
words of the Lord upon her head — "Oh, woman go in peace; 
thou hast loved much and all is forgiven thee ! " — then admir* 
ipg the glory of the Magdalene's zeal, he struck the key-note of 
that voice that re-echoed in the heavens, until the vaults of 
heaven were shaken again, when the nine choirs of angels 
gave glory to God over the one sinner that did penance ! So 
it was with us. We have seen the love, the mercy, the power 
that is exercised towards us. And now, dearly beloved 
brethren, let us consider the action of this sacrament upon 
society. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



205 



The Catholic Church received from Christ, our Lord, a 
two-fold mission. That mission the world is unwilling to 
recognize ; but that mission it is the destiny of the Church 
of God to fulfil until the end of time. That mission has in 
it a two-fold character. To sinners ; to those who are in 
darkness it brings the light ; to those who are dead in the 
corruption of sin it brings the life of the purifying influence 
of Divine grace. That is clear in this two-fold mission ; 
perfectly clear from the words of Christ to His Apostles. 
" You are the light of the earth," He said, " Vos estis lux 
mundi : You are the light of the world." Then, turning to 
them, on another occasion, He said, " And you are the salt of 
the earth." The light to illumine the world's darkness ; the 
salt to heal and purify the world's corruption. The first of 
these missions the Church of God fulfills in her teaching ; 
for the Psalmist said, with truth, " The declaration of thy 
word, Oh God, brings light and intelligence to thy little 
children." And, as it is the Church's destiny to be, until the 
end of time, the light of the world, so that light which is to 
come from her must be the very light of God. Therefore, 
the word of truth that creates that light can never die away 
from the Church's lips ; nor, coming from those lips, can it 
ever be polluted by the slightest iota or admixture of error. 
She has the power given to her by our Lord not only to 
illumine them in their darkness but to heal them in their 
corruption. What is the corruption of the sinner ? What 
is that corruption, that infirmity, that defilement to which 
Christ alluded when He said to His Apostles : " Ye are 
the salt of the earth ; ye must be put upon the sore places 
of the world ; ye must be put upon the festering wounds of 
the world?" What are these sore places — these festering 
wounds ? They are the sores and wounds of sin in the soul. 
Sin is the sore spot of the soul. Sin is the awful ulcer of 
society; sin that abounds everywhere. For it abounds in 
every circle : in the commercial circles, making a man un- 
trustworthy and dishonest ; in the domestic circle, making 
servants pilfer and steal ; making masters and mistresses 
exacting and unjust ; making children disobedient ; making 
parents forgetful of their duties to their children ; making 
the young man impure, and the married man unfaithful. 
All these things — all these evils — that are teeming around 
us, that meet us wherever we turn — that we cannot avoid 
seeing and hearing, be we ever so fastidious, — they come 
under the very touch of our hand and they disgust us with 
this life of ours. Then, we are fain to cry out with the 



206 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



Psalmist, " Oh, God, woe is me, because my pilgrimage here 
is so long perishing ! " All these things are the corruptions of 
mankind ; and the power that the Church received when she 
was called the " salt of the earth," is to purge away all this, 
to remedy all these evils, heal all these wounds, and sweeten 
all that bitterness and all that corruption of society. All 
this she does through the Sacrament of Penance — or, through 
the Confessional. There is she truly the saviour of society, 
end the world cannot do without her. How significant it is 
that, when Germany gave up the faith, three hundred years 
ago, such was the immorality, such was the impurity that 
filled the community at once, that actually a German city 
was obliged to petition to have the Confessional or the Sac- 
rament of Penance, restored. All classes of society said : 
"The responsibility is gone, — the yoke is removed 
from us; we need no longer betake ourselves to the 
task of looking up our sins and weeping over them, 
and wailing over them, and taking measures of avoid- 
ing them, or incurring the pain and humiliation of con- 
fessing them. All this is gone ," and then, like the Hebrews 
of old, they rose up, joined hands, and danced round the 
new-found idol — the golden calf of their own sensuality and 
wickedness. "You are the salt of the earth," He said to 
them. Oh, if the Catholic Church was not on this earth ! — 
if she were not here with her sacraments to create purity and 
to preserve it, to create honesty and to enforce it, to bring 
home the full and entire responsibility of every man, and to 
him personally — to bring home to every soul — the deformity 
of sin, the necessity of repenting individually for each and 
every sin, to shake every soul, in her Sacrament of Penance, 
from the lethargy of sin, — Oh, I .protest, my friends, I 
believe, if the Catholic Church were not here, operating upon 
her millions throughout the world, to do this that long before 
this time the chariot of human society, rolling down the 
steep hill of human infirmity, would have precipitated the 
whole world into destruction and death. 

How is it that Protestant employers and masters are so 
anxious to have Catholic servants, Catholic " help," Cathode 
apprentices, Catholic people about them ? How is it ? Because 
they are shrewd enough to know that the confessional which 
they despise creates honesty — enforces it. There is no 
stronger way to enforce honesty than to get a man to believe 
that he cannot live without Jesus Christ, — and that Jesus 
Christ is on the altar waiting for him to tell him that between 
him and the Saviour stands a barrier that he must overcome, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



207 



if he becomes dishonest — and that he cannot do without 
restoring to the last farthing whatever he has unjustly got; 
to tell him that if he becomes a thief, public or private, — that 
the accumulation of his thievery will build up an impenetrable 
wall between him and God; and that until that wall is pulled 
to pieces by restitution he never can approach the sacraments 
here nor the glory of God hereafter. An English Protestant 
clergyman came to me once, when I was on the English 
mission, and he said to me: " Father, I come to complain of one 
of my man servants." I said to him, " Well, sir, what on earth 
have I to do with your servants ? " " Oh," he said, " all my 
servants, both men and women, are Catholics ; and I would 
not think of employing anybody else." "What complaint," 
I said, "have you to make then of any of them?" " Well," 
he said, " I insist on their going to confession once a month — 
and this man has not been there in the last two months. So 
I came here to insist on his going there." " Well, but you 
do not believe in it." " Yes," he said, " I know I do not 
believe in it ; but so long as my Catholic people go, they 
will not steal from me, and so long as they do not go to con- 
fession and communion, they will not receive any wages from 
me ! " What is the agency that touches the depravity of the 
world and creates purity and honesty ? I answer it is the 
confessional. Remember that the idea of purity as a virtue, 
as it lies in the mind of Christ and in the mind of His 
Church, is not merely an external decorum, not merely the 
avoiding of gross, actual sins ; but that it begins in the very 
thoughts, in the inner chambers of the soul of man ; that it 
will not allow any impure or defiling imaginations to rest 
there for a single instant ; that it will not allow as much even 
as an impure thought to be sanctioned for one second by the 
way ; and out of that interior purity of soul, of thought, of 
imagination springs the external virtue of chastity; for 
without that interior purity, rendering the soul itself as can- 
did, as white, as innocent as was the soul of Mary on the day 
of her assumption — without that all external chastity would 
be as a dead bi dy without its soul. Now, the only way to 
create that interior purity — to create the essence of the 
virtue, to make th,' soul of the virtue, the life of the virtue— 
the only way is to establish firmly in the soul, and in the 
mind of man, the idea of his responsibility to God for every 
thought of his mind, as well as for every action and word of 
his life ; to bring him face to face with Christ ! to make him 
not only know but feel that He whom he serves, looks with a 
penetrating and scrutinizing gaze into the very inner 



208 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIOX. 



chambers of the soul. How does the Church do this ? By 
bringing that young man to confession; by putting him face 
to face with Jesus Christ; scrutinizing and examining his 
thoughts, his words and actions ; by making him search by 
the light of memory, every cranny of his soul, and of his 
imagination ; by making him feel that even although his lips 
may never have breathed an obscene word, even though this 
man may never have committed an impure action, he might 
still be as impure and as bad as the worst of men. This is 
only done by that action of the Church which not only 
teaches a man to be pure, but drags him as it were, with holy 
violence and puts him into the presence of the God of purity; 
and says : " Come, open your heart, my son, and let the light 
of Jesus Christ into your soul ! " 

Thus it is, that from the confessional spring those virtues 
by which man acts upon his fellow-man. The index of virtue 
is purity ; and the next virtue in relation to our fellow-man, 
is honesty. The third virtue is charity. And behold how 
the confessional acts here : If a man speaks badly of his 
neighbor; if he ruins that neighbor's character, or reputa- 
tation ; if he gets that neighbor thrown out of some lucrative 
employment, by his whisperings or his tales, — he goes to 
confession ; he says " I am sorry for the sin I have committed ; 
but I have got a difficulty" — and he finds, perhaps, to his 
astonishment, that the priest will say to him, — " There is 
another difficulty ; " until he makes good that man's 
character, there is no absolution for him; until he has 
swallowed the lie he has told, there is no pardon for him ; 
until he has restored to his neighbor the fair name and fame, 
of which by his whispering, and enmity, and injustice he had 
robbed him, there is no pardon for him. What greater, 
what stronger motive could there be to make a man gnaw 
his words to preserve him from detraction; to make him 
measure well his words before he inflicts an injury on his 
neighbor, when he knows if he gives way to this mean 
jealousy or enmity; if he says these things or publishes them, 
even though men may forget it, God will not forget it in the 
interests of his neighbor. " To Communion," this man must 
say, "I cannot go; nor cross the threshold of the kingdom 
of Heaven, until I have gone out and swallowed this lie that 
I have told." 

And so, pursue our relations to each other, to society, and 
to those around us ; into every detail of social life, and vou 
there will find the Church following you, guiding your foot- 
steps by her light, preserving your souls from sin, or touch 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



209 



ing them with a healing hand if you have fallen into sin. It 
is, therefore, no wonder at all, my friends, that every heresy, 
almost, that ever sprang up in the Church, assailed the con- 
fessional first. Nearly all heresies united in this — at least 
many of them — offering a bribe to poor human nature. And 
the bribe was, " You need not go any more to confession." 
When Luther started his Protestantism the world was 
shocked ; for as soon as the people heard, " Oh, it is all 
folly to go to confession ! you need not go any more ! there 
is no necessity !" — he abolished the obligation of making res- 
titution ; he abolished the form of the confessional that has 
restrained so many souls and kept them within settled, salu- 
tary barriers : he abolished all that, and left men to their 
own devices ; and he left the world, the Protestant world, as 
if Christ, our Lord, had never come upon earth, never touched 
our humanity; because he left it without the remedies by 
which sin could be avoided and evaded ; and he left the 
accumulated sins of man, from his childhood to his old age, 
like a mountain upon him, to bear them, — and to bear them 
before the altar of God and of the Church of God. Ah, cruel, 
and cruel, indeed, was the heart of him who devised this infer- 
nal scheme ! Oh, cruel Luther ! Oh, Luther, when thou 
did say to Jesus Christ and to His Church, " Let no more 
pardon and no more grace come from you ! Let men live 
without you ! " — terrible w T as that denial of the greatest of 
earth's comforts, as well as most substantial of Heaven's ben- 
efits ! For what greater comfort can a man have — if there 
be any hidden sin weighing upon his spirit, breaking his 
heart, loading him with a burden which he cannot bear alone 
— what is the natural instinct of that man ? To find a friend 
to unbosom himself to that friend ; to lighten his own burden 
by sharing it with another. Even if that friend has no power 
to relieve him, even if he have nothing to him but give a word 
of'sympathy or consolation — merely to tell, merely to open the 
heart, is such relief, — such relief as can only be felt by those 
who, in order to gain it, might else speak their sin before the 
world. But the great drawback is, " Where shall we find this 
friend !" We must demand of him sympathy. We must 
demand of him patience ; but, above all what we 
larely find, we must demand oi him to keep what- 
ever we tell him a secret. How rarefy do you find a friend 
with whom you can entrust a secret ? Tell a man a thing 
that you would not wish the world to know, and the old prov- 
erb is that you are in that man's power for the rest of your 
life. Why ? Because if he tells that about you, you are 



210 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ruined ! And lie may ruin you, because you put yourself in 
his power. But who ever thought this of a priest in the con- 
fessional ? Did it ever come across a Catholic's mind ? I 
verily believe it never came, even as a temptation from hell 
for not telling one's sins. Well you know that that man has 
no power ; well you know that you can meet that man an 
hour afterwards, and you can put your hand into his, as if 
you had never bent your knee to him ; that he will never be 
so infamous a blasphemer as to remember that which the 
Almighty God in Heaven has forgotten ! 

And so, my friends, you will find even the heathen enemy 
of the highest civilization say : Thus it is that the voice in 
the confessional acts on society. If the whole world were 
Catholic — and I will conclude with this sentence — if the 
whole world were Catholic, and that all men consented to go 
regularly to the sacraments, and to approach worthily 
to the sacrament of penance, this alone would put 
an end to all sin. There would be no more sin. There 
would be no more heart breaking; no more tears; no more 
terrific records of robberies and murders ; no more women 
hardening their hearts and making them more ferocious than 
the tigress when she devours and tears her young; no more 
of that cautious, cold, calculating dishonesty — men casting 
their wiles about each other like a spider's web, to entrap 
each other; no misery in this world ; all would be happiness, 
if men would only open their festering souls and let in the 
salt of the power and of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ ! 

Thus do we behold the action of the confessional on 
society. Oh, my friends, let us pray that God may enlighten 
those who, without the pale of the Catholic Church, go on 
from day to day, from year to year, adding sin to sin, and 
bearing the accumulated burden of their sins before the 
eternal judgment seat of Jesus Christ. 

While we pray for them, Oh, let us, like good men and 
true, enter into those privileges and graces which we enjoy, 
cleansing our souls from sin, preserve them in their purity by 
the frequent application of grace which destroys those sins at 
the beginning, and, by frequent confession and holy commu- 
nion, build up our souls upon the grace of graces, and strength 
of strengths, until we are gathered, in the fulness of the yeart 
of our manhood, into the joy of our Lord Jesus Christ. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



L A Lecture delivered by 6 the Rev.JFATHER Burke, on Monday evening 
May 13, in the Academy of Music, New York.] 

"the life and times oe o'connell." 



Ladies and Gentlemen : The history of this age of ours 
tells of many men who have used their energies and their 
powers for the purpose of enslaving their fellow-men, and for 
the purposes of injustice and persecution. This age of ours, 
however, has had the grace to produce one man who received 
from a grateful nation the proudest title that ever was 
accorded a man, — he was called the "Liberator of his 
country," (Applause). I need not mention his name — his 
name is written upon the history of the world, under this 
grand title of "Liberator;" — his name is enshrined in every 
Irish heart, and in the memory of every Irishman, under the 
glorious title of the Liberator. When We hear that word, 
those among us who are advancing into the vale of years, 
remember, as he seems to rise before them, at the sound of 
the name of "Liberator," the colossal, gigantic figure, the 
brows overladen with mighty thought ; the Irish eye beam- 
ing with intelligence and with humor; the uplifted arm, 
emphasizing every glorious maxim of freedom and of religion; 
and at the sound of the word " Liberator," we behold rising 
out of his grave and standing before us as he once stood and 
held sway over millions of Irishmen, the glorious figure of 
Daniel O'Connell (applause). There is nothing, my friends, 
that ought to be more grateful or more instructive to every 
high-minded man than to recall the deeds by which a man 
gained that well-deserved glory; for such a man not only 
binds to his own brow the crown of immortal fame, but he 
also leaves behind him for the consideration of those who 
come after him, a glorious example of manliness, integrity, 
and virtue. This should be the study of every man among 
us; and never can ws study thern more favorably, than when 
we see them embodied in the life and the acts of one who 
dazzled the world by the glory of his genius, and left behind 
him, in the hearts of his fellow-men, traditions of mighty 
admiration and tenderest love. Who, therefore, was this man ? 



212 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



For whom did he contend? By whom was he crowned 
with his glorious title of the Liberator of his country? 

Oh ! my friends, before we sketch his life, it is well for 
us to cast our thoughts back some eighty years, and consider 
what Ireland was at the close of the last, or the 18th century. 
It seemed, indeed, as if the closing of the century should have 
been bright and peaceful and happy ; it seemed as if the sun 
of Ireland had risen at last, and the night of the 18th cen- 
tury would have passed into the roll of ages, under the full 
blaze of noontide prosperity, and happiness for Ireland. In 
1782, eighteen years before the final close of the century, 
there was in Ireland a reunion of the grandest intellects, and 
the brightest names, that, perhaps, ever adorned the pages of 
our national history. The walls of the Parliament House, in 
College Green, resounded to the glorious appeals of a Grat- 
tan and a Flood ; while the stately and dignified Charle- 
mont upheld the honor of the nation in the Irish House of 
Lords. They demanded of England a full recognition of 
Ireland's rights, and of Ireland's independence as a nation 
(applause). Their voices were heard and were unheeded, 
until in a happy moment, the necessities of the times obliged 
England to permit an organization of armed Irishmen, 
called the " Volunteers of '82." The men of Ireland took 
arms into their hands, and it is well that, Catholics as we are, 
we should not forget that this glorious movement originated 
among our Protestant brethren of the North of Ireland 
(applause). The men of Ireland took arms in their hands, and 
then Grattan spoke again, he spoke with a hundred thousand 
armed and drilled Irishmen at his back ; and England was 
obliged to listen and to pay the greatest attention to his words 
(applause). He demanded the charter of Ireland's indepen- 
dence, and he obtained it, because he spoke in the name of 
an organized and an armed nation ; he arose in the House of 
Commons, and he pronounced these words : "I found my 
country in the dust ; I raised her up ; she stands to-day in 
her queenly independence, and nothing remains to me but to 
bow before the majestic image, and to say esto jperpetua, — be 
thou perpetuated in thy freedom, O Ireland." 

Fair, indeed, and bright was the vision ; — industry devel- 
oped, trade encouraged, magnificent buildings, — such as the 
Four Courts and Custom House, of Dublin, — erected, and 
the people speaking with a nation's voice ; fair and bright 
was the prospect ; only it was too bright to last. The Irish 
Parliament, at last, consented to take some steps for the 
emancipation of their Catholic coun^ ym m, so that all the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



213 



nation might enter into the act of legislation ; to have no 
laws made by class or caste, but by all men who had the 
name and the privileges of Irishmen. It was too bright to 
last. The English Government took thought. The follow- 
ing year saw a strange Viceroy sent over ; the following 
year the insidious Army Act was introduced ; the pressure 
and apprehension of war was taken from England ; and the 
moment her hands were free, she turned around to rivet the 
chains upon Ireland's form. The Army Act was passed ; 
and then the Irish Parliament had only to stop the voice of 
Grattan and every patriotic man. By that act it was de- 
clared illegal for every Irishman to carry arms ; and the 
Volunteers were disarmed. ~No sooner were the arms, the 
guns and artillery taken from them, and these strong men 
deprived of their arms, than England at once began a sys- 
tematic persecution of the Irish people with the express 
intention of goading them into rebellion, and thereby fasten- 
ing the chains which she secured about them (great applause). 
One act followed another. In 1794, Earl Fitzwilliam was 
made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He arrived in the coun- 
try in January. He was the friend of Ireland, and of Ire- 
land's son, the immortal Grattan. As soon as ever the 
English government discovered that this man intended to 
rule Ireland justly, he was instantly recalled ; and the people 
who greeted him with shouts of joy in January, accompanied 
him with tearful eyes, as he took his departure on the 25th 
of March of the same year. Then followed act after act ot 
tyranny and oppression. In vain did Grattan, Curran, and 
the immortal Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was then in the 
Irish Parliament, protest against these cruel acts. At length 
finding that government was determined to destroy the 
people, if possible, in the year '97 Grattan arose in the 
Irish Parliament and said : " I have offered you measures for 
the happiness of Ireland, and you have refused them. You 
propose measures for the misery of Ireland, and you will 
carry them. I have no more use or business," he said, " to 
remain in this House ;" and the aged patriot departed from 
the House, followed by Arthur O'Connor, Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald, and a few others, who left with despair in their 
minds and with aching hearts (applause). 

Then came the dawn of 1798, when Kildare and some of 
the midland counties made a miserable and unsuccessful 
attempt at revolution. Heroic Wexford arose ; the stalwart 
men of the hill-sides of Wexford arose. Unarmed as thev 
were, — or armed only with the armor of their infinite bravery 



214 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



— they stood out for dreary months against the untied power 
of England ; until at length the rebellion, as it was called 
was suppressed — after the slaughter of the people. A ferocious 
foreign soldiery, and the yeomanry, were let loose through 
the land; tortures were inflicted upon innocent and unoffend- 
ing men and woman, worse than ever Cromwell inflicted upon 
the people of Ireland ; and '98 closed upon the nation trodden 
in the blood-stained dust, and with minds and hearts utterly 
prostrated and broken under the iron heel of the enemy. And 
this O'Connell saw during the years '98 and '99. He listened 
day after day, night after night, as John Philpot Curran 
stood alone between the tyrant upon the bench, — the blood- 
stained and ferocious Norbury, — and the poor prisoner, so 
often innocent in the dock, — with loud, heroic, though fruit- 
less voice, vindicating the principles of eternal justice and 
the majesty and purity of the law (applause). The heart of 
the nation was broken in '98, and nothing remained but for the 
infamous English minister to work his will upon the people of 
Ireland. That man was called Lord Castlereagh. He 
cut his throat afterwards (hisses) — and it used to be a stand- 
ing toast in the west of Ireland, even within my recollection, 
for two or three friends, when they met together, to feel in 
duty bound to fill their glasses and give: "Here's to the 
strap that put the keen edge on the razor that cut Castlereagh's 
throat" (applause and laughter}. He bribed the Irish mem- 
bers of Parliament with money ; or bribed them with titles ; 
he practiced the vilest arts of corruption that could be sug- 
gested by his own wicked mind and corrupted heart ; and he 
carried, just at the beginning of this present 19th century, 
the measure which has been the ruin of Ireland, namely, the 
abolition of the Irish Parliament, and the union of the two 
countries under one Legislature. It was in vain that Grattan 
thundered against this iniquity with his heroic voice. It was 
in vain that Fitzgerald, Kendall, Bush, and other great Irish- 
men of the day, spoke in language that is immortal for its elo- 
quence and for its justice in the cause ol their country and 
their country's national existence. Everything was borne down 
and flooded with English corruption and bribery. And this 
act was passed, by which Ireland was deprived of the power 
to make her own laws ; and a nation hostile to her, and deter- 
mined upon her corruption and ruin, was commissioned to 
make laws for Ireland. The act was passed. It has been the 
apology of every cruelty, and every injustice that we have 
suffered from that day to this ; the accursed act of Union, by 
which Ireland lost her power. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



215 



Among the bribes that were held out to the Irish people 
to let this Act pass, there was one, and it was a promise that 
was given then, that the Catholics should be emancipated. 
"No sooner was the Union passed, than William Pitt, the 
Prime Minister of England, betrayed his faith, and broke his 
word with Ireland ; and when he had received the gift of our 
existence into his hands, he laughed at us in the face, and 
mocked us as fools, for trusting him; and a fool is every 
Irishman on the face of the earth that trusts England and 
England's Parliament, or that imagines for a single moment 
that the English Government or the English Parliament will 
ever give justice, or equal laws to Ireland, unless they are 
obliged and coerced by the fear of arms (great applause). If 
the Volunteers of '82 had kept their guns, he would have kept 
his word (renewed applause). 

And now, my friends, what was the position of Ireland 
when O'Connell first appeared in the history of our country ? 
Born in 1775, he was called to the bar, in Dublin, in 1798 : 
it was only five years before — that is to say, in 1793 — that the 
Penal Law was relaxed, so that a highly educated Catholic 
gentleman was allowed the privilege of earning his bread as 
a lawyer. We first find him while the question of the Union 
was being agitated. He attended a meeting in the Corn 
Exchange of Dublin. It was composed exclusively of Cathol- 
ics, mostly professional men. They came to discuss the ques- 
tion of Ireland's existence, and to protest against the Union. 
It will give you some idea of how things were carried on in 
those days. As I told you, no sooner was the meeting assem- 
bled in the Corn Exchange, than the tramp of soldiers was 
heard outside and in swaggered Major Sirr, the town-major 
of Dublin, at the head of his troops. He marched around the 
hall and surrounded the meeting. He then commanded them 
to ground their arms, and down fell the heavy guns of the Han- 
overian and English soldiers. "Now, gentlemen, you may 
begin your discussions," said he ; but every man there knew 
that his very life was at the mercy of that blood-stained, 
unmerciful, hard-hearted man. There was no liberty of 
thought, much less of speech ; a man could not call his soul 
his own in those days ; and it was under these circumstances, 
in the presence of Major Sirr and his soldiery, that O'Connell, 
for the first time in his life spoke a word for Ireland. He 
tells us, that what between the intimidation and the threats ; 
what between the effect of this intimidation and his speaking 
as a young man, he felt that his heart would break with 
anxiety and fear while he was speaking. 



216 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Now the Union is passed. Ireland is annihilated ; and 
the only hope for Ireland now, — as it was our only hope for 
three hundred years before, — was the strength and power of 
Ireland's faith, — Ireland's Catholicity, which was still alive. 
There it was, still unconquered and unconquerable, — the 
only element of life, the only element of courage, the seedling 
of national regeneration which was left to us, — our holy faith, 
which we clung' to in spite of persecution and blood for three 
hundred years (renewed applause). But this powerful ele- 
ment lay dormant in Ireland. A Catholic Board, as it was 
called, was formed in Dublin. A body of Irishmen came to- 
gether to try and agitate for Catholic Emancipation in the 
British House of Commons, in London, as in the Irish House 
at home ; and found a glorious advocate in the great Henry 
Grattan (applause). Year after year he brought forward his 
motion, praying the Legislature to strike off the chains from 
the Irish Catholics, and, year after year, he met with over- 
whelming majorities against him ; and his appeal and his 
cause were laughed to scorn in the British Parliament. In 
vain did Plunkett take up that glorious theme ; in vain did 
Edmund Burke, the immortal Edmund Burke (great applause), 
England's greatest philosopher and statesman, — Ireland's 
greatest son, whose name shall live forever in the annals of 
the world's history for every highest gift of genius and virtue, 
— in vain did Burke and Fox, with all the English statesmen 
of mind, advocate the claims of Irish Catholics. They got 
no hearing ; there was justice for every man ; there was con- 
sideration for every man ; there was respect for every man, 
until it was discovered that he was a Catholic and an Irish- 
man ; and then there was not for him even the courtesy of a 
hearing, but only the laughter of scorn. They had conquered 
us ; they thought they could depise us. They imagined, be- 
cause we were conquered we were degraded. The Catholic 
Board of which I speak, in Dublin, was afraid to raise its 
voice, and those who befriended us were liberal Protestants 
and many glorious liberty-loving patriots there were among 
them (applause). God forbid that I should forget it (renewed 
applause). 

The great masses of the Irish people — then amounting to 
nearly eight millions of men, — were crushed into the earth 
and were afraid to speak. Under the tyranny of a hostile 
government, under the tyranny of their cruel and unjust 
landlords, the Catholic party were afraid to speak. Grattan's 
voice was unheeded ; he was refused a hearing in the House. 
Now, the Almighty God, in His mercy to Irishmen, lifted up 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 217 

a man gigantic in form, gigantic in intellect, heroic in cour- 
age, strong in faith, tender in heart, immaculate in his purity, 
who was destined to shake the Irish race into se f-assertion 
and energy ; who was destined to rule these people and to 
lift them from the ground, to put a voice upon their lips and 
make 1 their hearts throb again with glorious excitement and 
high hope. O'Connell arose — (great applause, again and 
again renewed) — alone, to head the Irish people ; — Avith the 
grasp of an athlete, to strangle every man that arose against 
these people, alone he rose to lead a prostrate nation high up 
the rugged road of liberty, until he led them to kneel before 
a free altar, and burst the bonds that bound them. Alone 
had he to do it. In 1813 he took the charge of, and a lead- 
ing place in, the Catholic Association. At that time, mark 
the difficulties that he had to contend with : — he had a peo- 
ple afraid to speak ; — he had an aristocracy opposed to him 
to a man ; he had the great landed interest of England and 
the English people opposed to him to a man ; he had the 
English Catholics opposed to him ; he had a government that 
was watching him, crossing him, day after day, with persecu- 
tions, arresting him, now on this charge, now on that, accus- 
ing him now of having said this, and then of having said 
that. He had men watching for his life. He had to conquer 
the false friend and the open enemy, defy the Government, 
defy the Bench and the Bar ; he had to take the pistol in his 
hands, bitterly, though his Catholic heart regretted it ; he 
had actually to commit a tremendous crime in the cause of 
Ireland (applause). He was prosecuted for some sayings of 
his with Richard Lalor Shiel ; the Grand Jury threw out the 
bills ; there was no case against them. Finding that they 
could not entrap him into the meshes of the law, which with 
a superhuman genius and prudence he was able to evade, a 
murderer was put upon his track. As of old, when they 
found they were unable to conquer Owen Roe O'Neill with 
the sword, they put poison in his drink ; so, when they found 
they could not conquer O'Connell by the sword, they set a 
murderer upon his track. The whip of D'Esterre was lifted 
to strike the magnificent form of Ireland's best son. What 
could he do ? Insulted over and over again, that life that was 
so precious to Ireland, he freely risked for Ireland. I do not 
justify him. No. Nor does he ask me from his grave in 
Glasnevin to-night, nor from his place in Heaven, to justify 
him. Even as St. Peter, for his one denial of his Master, 
wept every day of his life, so O'Connell, for his one moment 
of forgetfulness of his Catholic duties, wept every day of his 
10 



218 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



life. Yet, what could he do ? Young, brave as a lion, confi- 
dent in his atrength and in his dexterity, he accepted the 
jhallenge ; and, on a fine morning, Mr. D'Esterre, who threat- 
ened to flog O'Connell, and wanted to fight him, took a cab 
and drove out to Lord Cloncurry's place, about ten miles out- 
side of Dublin, and there, on a field of an estate called Lyons, 
he met Daniel O'Connell. Now, D'Esterre thought he was 
sure to win, as he was a small, thin, miserable little man 
(laughter), like an attenuated herring long out of the sea 
(great laughter), and it seemed that, to hit him a man should 
be able to shoot a rat at half a mile (applause and great laugh- 
ter) ; while O'Connell was a fine, full, burly, mountain of a 
man. To fire at him, was something like firing at a haystack 
(laughter). Then, again, D'Esterre was a dead shot, and 
O'Connell was considered to be a far more formidable man 
with the pen than with the pistol. I have my account of 
this from old men who were on the ground that morning. 
They said that there was deliberate murder in D'Esterre's 
eye, as he took his aim. O'Connell simply stood there for 
Ireland ; he could not keep his hold of the people (considering 
the genius of the time) unless he met that man, and fought 
him ; he lifted his pistol, apparently, carelessly ; but he threw 
the light gray eye after it (laughter and applause). Two 
reports were heard. The whistling ball passed before O'Con- 
nell's eyes ; but D'Esterre was on the ground ; and he never 
got up again (laughter and applause). Major McNamara, 
of Clare, was on the ground, — a Protestant gentleman, who 
had fought a great many duels in his time. He came up to 
O'Connell, with tears in his eyes, and said — " I declare to 
Heaven, Dan, it was the neatest shot that ever was made " 
(great laughter and applause). " If ever I am to meet my 
man again," said the Major, "I hope, if he is to strike me at 
all, he will do it neatly. It is almost an honor to be killed 
so beautifully " (renewed laughter). 

The Catholic Associations, formed under O'Connell, grew 
under his genius. The Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, the 
Bellews, the Trimblestons, the Fingals, were shocked when 
they heard this man speak ; they were frightened ; they were 
afraid to speak to the English people at all ; they were afraid 
to petition Parliament. Even John Keogh and the Democratic 
portion of the Catholics of Ireland were for maintaining what 
they called a " dignified silence," what means a silence that 
proceeds from fear. Out came O'Connell as brave as a lion. 
He knew no fear. He attacked; he did not petition. Ho 
attacked the men at the head of the State; he called them 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



219 



every vile name he could think of. One man was called a 
" pig ; " another " a perjurer ; " another was told to " get out 
of that ! " (laughter) : annother was called a " bloated buffo n ;" 
and so on. And these grand English statesmen, — who thought 
they could walk or ride rough-shod over all Ireland, —found 
to their amazement, that there was an Irishman who not only 
was not afraid of them, but who gave them nick-names that 
stuck to them for the rest of their lives (applause and laugh- 
ter). When the Catholic people of Ireland found that, some- 
how or other, a lion had got in among them— -a lion rampant 
roaring for his prey ; — when they found that there was one 
Catholic man in the land, speaking their own language, glory- 
ing in identity of race with them, — that made every man, even 
to the Prince of Wales, at that time (George IV afterwards), 
afraid of him, — they plucked up courage, they raised their 
heads ; and they asked themselves was the world coming to an 
end ! for what was going to be done with this man ? But 
when they found that this man had a genius and eloquence 
that nothing could withstand : — when they found that the 
cause of justice and of truth on this man's lips meant the tre- 
mendous cause that would shake the world ; when they found 
the Catholic nations, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, sympa- 
thizing with this man, admiring his genius, translating his 
speeches into their tongues, and proclaiming him one of the 
greatest men of the age, — Ireland began to feel confidence 
and pride in O'Connell (applause). Now, I say that Ireland's 
confidence and pride in O'Connell, from the year 1810 to the 
year 1829, was her salvation (applause). He roused the clergy, 
the priests even were afraid to speak; there was not a clerical 
voice to be heard in the cause ; the bishops were afraid of 
their lives ; if they spoke, it was with bated breath, as men 
who are only permitted to live, who are winked at in order 
that they might be tolerated in the land. He roused the 
clergy ; he sent them among the people ; he commanded them 
to preach a Gospel, second only in its sacredness to the Gospel 
of our holy religion — that is the Gospel of Ireland's glorious 
nationality (tremendous applause). 

And thus it came to pass, that in the year 1813, George 
Canning, the great English statesman, was glad to propose 
a measure for the emancipation of the Catholics of Ireland. 
And now comes O'Connell again in all his glory before us. 
Canning prepared his bill. The Catholics of Ireland were to 
b.e emancipated; they were to be allowed to enter all the 
professions ; they were to be allowed to enter Parliament ; 
they were to be allowed to mount the Judicial Bench as the 



220 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

judges of the land ; the were to be allowed to legislate for 
themselves and for their people, all — all, upon one condition ; 
and that was, they were to allow the English government 
what was called "The power of the veto," which I will 
explain to you. Whenever a Catholic priest was to be made 
a bishop, his name was to be sent to Rome ; and if the Pope 
approved of him, then, instead of making him a bishop, out 
of hand, he was to send back his name with the nomination; 
and the moment a man got his nomination, instead of going 
to the Archbishop, and getting him to coiisecrate Mm, he 
was to send the nomination to the Secretary of State, and the 
Secretary of State was to submit it to the Council of English 
Lords, and the Lord Chancellor of England, or the Irish 
Lords, and the Lord Chancellor of Ireland ; and they were to 
examine this man, and see whether he was worthy to be a 
bishop (laughter); they were such good judges, they knew all 
about that (renewed laughter). In all probability, if the bill 
had passed, Lord Korbury, of whom you have heard, would 
have been one of these examining Lords, examining a priest 
in his theology (laughter). And if they disapproved of a 
man — in other words — if they found him a true Irishman, if 
they found he had one spark of love for his country in him 
they were to put their "veto," upon him, and the Pope was 
to have no power in the matter. You understand what it 
meant. They wanted to exclude from the Episcopate of 
Ireland such men as the immortal Dr. Doyle, or the great 
John McIIale of Tuam (tremendous cheering for Archbishop 
McHale); they wanted to make Bishops only of men who 
would lie down at their feet, and be trampled upon, who 
would tell the people that there was no such word as freedom 
in the Gospel (applause). Such was the state of affairs at the 
time when Canning's Bill was proposed, with " the veto " 
attached to it. All the English Catholics said, " Oh, yes; 
that will be very well." All the Irish " respectable" Catholics, 
with a few Irish Catholic Lords, and a few Irish Catholic 
Knights were in favor of the "veto." "Why not?" they 
said, "we will all be glad to be emancipated on any condition." 
Some of the Irish Catholic Bishops admitted it. And worst 
of all the Pope was then a prisoner, in France ; Napoleon had 
him a prisoner. Affairs in Rome were managed by a high 
functionary, whose name was Quarantotti; and this high 
prelate when he got the draft of Canning's bill, and read it, 
such was the state of slavery in which we were, all the 
world over, — persecuted everywhere — that the Pope's repre- 
sentative actually wrote to Dr. Poynter, Catholic Bishop of 



I 



THE CATIICLIC MISSION. 



221 



London, and to the Irish Bishops, telling them to accept the 
"veto" and emancipation with it. The moment O'Connell 
heard this, — he who had risen against the Orangeism ol 
Ireland, rose like an angry giant, and told the Irish Bishops 
and the Irish Priests, — aye, and Rome itself, — that that veto 
never should be admitted into Ireland (tremendous applause). 
He came, exulting like a giant in his strength, and thundered 
at the door of the English Parliament, and said, "Emancipa- 
tion and freedom without any conditions " (applause). " We 
are no longer slaves," he said; "we are no longer beggars. 
We come and demand, and insist upon emancipation, with- 
out any condition whatsoever to bind it" (renewed applause). 

Now, my friends, what gave O'Connell this power ? I answer 
that, by this time, O'Connell had organized the Irish people 
in their parishes; he had made them join the Association; 
he had fixed a tax of a penny a month upon every Catholic man 
in Ireland. It was not the penny he was looking for, but for the 
man's name. He got them all enrolled in the Association ; 
he got the priests to know all the men who were associated; 
he got the people to know one and other; he published their 
numbers to them ; he told them the secret of their strength ; 
he had the priesthood of Ireland, — the parish priests, the 
curates, the friars with him, to a man. No " veto " for them 
(laughter and applause). Why? For many reasons. I will not 
speak now of the effect of that legislation (if it had passed) upon 
the Church. I will not speak of it as effecting her liberties. But 
what w r as more natural than that every honest priest in 
Ireland should oppose the veto ? because he must have said 
to himself, "What chance have I of ever being made a 
bishop?" (Laughter and applause.) Canning, though the 
friend of Ireland, was told to keep his Emancipation Act. 
Things went on. The Irish people, every day increas- 
ing in their numbers, affiliated with the Catholic Asso- 
ciation; every day feeling their way, feeling their 
strength. The thundering voice of the mighty O'Connell 
went through the land. He went here and there through the 
country: he sacrificed his profession and all its vast gains, 
and he devoted himself to marshalling the people, until at 
length, things were brought to such a pass that when Lord 
Wellington, the conqueror of Waterloo, and the bitterest 
Tory enemy that ever Ireland had (hisses), when Wellington 
came into power, sworn, if he could help it, never to do any- 
thing for the Irish Catholics, and having a King, the 
basest, vilest, the most polluted of men, the infamous George 
IV, (hisses) — having that King at his back, who swore that 



222 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



he never would grant anything to Irish Catholics, — O'Connell 
had so marshalled the Irish nation, that the man who had 
conquered Napoleon at Waterloo was obliged to acknowledge 
that O'Connell had "beaten him; and he went to the King and 
said, " If you will not emancipate the Catholics without any 
condition, and give them freedom, you will have a revolution 
in Ireland" (loud applause). It was not for love, it was not for 
justice, that this Act was granted. Never since the day that 
Hi chard Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, set foot, with hi3 
Normans, upon the soil of Ireland, — never from that hour to 
this, has England granted us one iota of justice, except under 
the influence of craven fear (applause). 

The year 1828 came. Wellington came into power; and the 
Catholic Association, like men who had now learned to speak, 
passed a decree that no man that accepted office under Lord 
Wellington should be returned to Parliament, for any borough 
or any county. There was a member, at the time, for the 
county of Clare, a very good man; a very estimable and 
agreeable man; and his father was really a great man, a true 
patriot: this man's name was Vesey Fitzgerald: and he 
accepted office under the Duke of Wellington's Govern- 
ment. That obliged him to go back to Clare to ask the 
people to re-elect him. The people, at that time, were 
altogether in the hands of the landlords; and when the day 
of the election came they were called together, not even 
being given their breakfast before they left; and the bailing 
and the land steward, and the landlord drove them, as you 
would drive a flock of sheep, to give their votes. So, every 
landlord could say to another, "I have so many votes; how 
many have you ? " The people had no voice at all, except 
just to register their votes. Yesey Fitzgerald was a popular 
man; he came back to Clare for re-election; when, like a 
thunder clap, came the words of O'Connell: " I am going to 
stand for Clare, and be elected to Parliament from it" 
(applause). The British Government was silenced with utter 
amazement and astonishment at the audacity of the man. 
The whole world stood confounded at the greatness of his 
courage. He went down to Clare. The priests came around 
him; he raised his standard inscribed "Freedom from land- 
lord intimidation ! " "Every man has his own conscience, 
and his own rights;" and by a sweeping majority of the 
honest and manly Irishmen of the County Clare, O'Connell 
was returned (applause). While they were discussing the 
terms of emancipation ; while they were asking each other could 
they allow Catholics the privilege of returning members to 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



223 



Parliament, of their own religion ; while they were trying to 
devise how they would neutralize it, how they would keep it 
out ; in spil e of all, this big, huge man walks in on the floor 
of the House of Commons returned as member from Clare. 
He advances to the table to take the oaths of allegiance and 
loyalty. The Clerk of the House of Commons rose to put the 
book in his hands to swear him. " What am I to be sworn 
to?" "To swear this;" he reads: "The sacrifice of the 
Mass, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the 
Saints is damnable idolatry." [Here the lecturer, as if in 
intense indignation, dashed down the book which, in descri- 
bing the attitude of O'Connell, he held in his hand.] "In the 
name of two hundred millions of men ; in the name of eight 
millions of the Irish race; in the name of antiquity; in the 
name of history; in the name of the God of Heaven, the God 
of truth, I reject that oath," he says, "for it is a damnable 
falsehood." (Tremendous cheers, which lasted for some 
minutes.) He found a " veto," with a vengeance, lying before 
him; and as he would not have the Act of Emancipation, with 
a " veto," tacked on to it, so he would not sit down in the 
House of Parliament with an infernal lie on his lips (cheers). 

Three times was the Act of Catholic Emancipation put 
before the English House of Commons ; and, sorely against 
their will, — because the Prime Minister and his associates in 
the government told them, with trembling lips, " You must 
do it. The Irish are prepared for revolution ! You must do 
it ! They will sever the connection altogether ! They will 
break up the Empire ! " — they passed it. It went before the 
Lords. For three days they held out against it, vomiting 
out their bigotry. " No ! no ! rather die than do it ! No ! " 
" But you must do it ! " was the answer (cheers and laugh- 
ter). The Irish people have found a man ; and that man haa 
united them as one man ; and, now, O'Connell represents 
Ireland ; and O'Connell stands at the door and tells them : 
K You must do it ! " (cheers). The bill passed the Lords and 
Commons, and Wellington took it, on bended knee, and 
offered it to George the Fourth. The King refused to read 
it. " You must read it ! " He read it. "Never!" "You 
must do it ? It cannot be helped ! He look the pen in his 
hand, — and he burst into tears ! He did not weep when he 
broke the heart of his wife, and declared her an adultress. 
He did not weep at the ruin of every form of innocence that 
ever came before him, — that was destroyed and polluted by 
his unholy touch. He did not weep when he left Richard B. 
Sheridan, his own friend, to die of starvation in a garret in 



224 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



London. He had no tears to weep. He had no heart to feel* 
The bloated voluptuary ! — he was never known to weep in his 
life, only when he was signing the bill of Emancipation ; and 
then he wept the devil's tears (cheers). The Act was passed 
and declared law on the 13th of April, 1839 ; and, to use the 
eloquent words of my brother in religion, Lacordaire, 
" Eight millions of Irishmen sat down in the British House 
of Commons in the person of Daniel O'Connell." And yet, 
mark the spite, the deliberate spite of the government. 
After the Act of Emancipation, they would not let him take 
his seat, until he had to go back to Clare to be re-elected. 
After the Act of Emancipation was passed, they made a 
number of barristers — English barristers — King's counsel — 
members of the bar ; and while the young men — young 
counsel — received this privilege, — the head of the Irish bar 
— the head of the Irish people was denied it. They thought 
to vent their spleen on him, and leave him in the back- 
ground, — as if he could be left in the back-ground, — whom 
the Almighty God brought forth (cheers). 

And now, my friends, the great crowning act of his life being 
thus accomplished, he did not rest one moment ; but he turned 
his thoughts to the second great object for which he lived. 
And, indeed, it was scarcely the second but the first, viz. : the 
Repeal of the Union. Some people in Ireland — and, else- 
where — think that the Repeal of the Union was an after 
thought of O'Connell ; that he did not intend it in the begin- 
ning ; that he never thought of it until he had coerced them 
into emancipating the Catholics. It is not so. Twenty years 
before Catholic Emancipation was passed, O'Connell declared 
that he would labor to the last hour of his life for the one 
purpose of repealing that accursed Union (cheers). Even in 
Grattan's time — (and Grattan lived until 1820) — even in Grat- 
tan's time, the Catholics of Ireland already petitioned for the 
Repeal of the Union, and Grattan told them : " If ever you 
Catholics of Ireland, rise up in your united strength, you will 
get the Repeal of the Union, or anything else England may 
have it in her power to bestow upon you ! " (cheers). From 
1839 until 1849 — for a period of ten years — O'Connell sat in 
the British Parliament, opposed to all the rivalry, all the 
opposition, all the contempt, that the bigotry of English Pro- 
testantism could bring to bear upon him. Every man in that 
House hated him as the devil is said to hate holy water (laugh- 
ter). But he stuck to his own courage, and his own trick of 
giving names. Stanley, the late Earl of Derby, rose to op- 
pose him, and he turned upon him in this way : " >it down 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



225 



scorpion Stanley !" And until Stanley went to his long home, 
he was known by the name of " Scorpion Stanley." Disraeli 
attacked him, and O'Connell turned round and said : " Oh, 
here is a Jew ; a lineal descendant of the impenitent thief 
that refused to be converted on the cross" (laughter). Mr. 
Sugden, the Chancellor, deprived him of the magisterial power. 
O'Connell called him " the man with the ugly name :" and 
whenever he spoke Of him, or replied to him, he never alluded 
to him by name, but, in his supreme wit, O'Connell would 
say, he should have said, as " the man with the ugly name has 
observed" (laughter). And so, by his undaunted courage, by 
his wit, by his tremendous argumentative power, and by his 
swelling eloquence, he crushed the opposition of the English 
House of Commons, and, as he opened the door by the vio- 
lence of his genius, he held his footing there by the same gen- 
ius : until, in a few years the fate of the two great parties of 
England was in the hands of O'Connell (cheers). O'Connell 
and his " tail" — as it was called, commanded such influence, 
that, on any great question affecting the existence of the gov- 
ernment, the Premier of England always, in his necessity, 
came to O'Connell to beg him to have pity on the govern- 
ment, and not to turn them out of office (laughter). 

And now began to take form and symmetry the great 
repeal agitation. He who had united Ireland as one man in 
the sacred cause of religion, united them again, as one man, in 
the cause of nationality (cheers). From end to end of the 
land he travelled ; and wherever he appeared, the enthusiastic 
heart and manhood of Ireland gathered round him. Oh, how 
grandly does he rise before my imagination now? Oh, how 
magnificent is the figure that now looms up in the halls of 
my memory, as I look back to that glorious year of 1843 — the 
" repeal year" of Ireland (cheers). He stands within the 
honored walls of Dundalk, and three hundred thousand Irish- 
men are around him. Not a voice of discord ; not a word of 
quarrelling; not a single jarring, even of thought; not a 
drunken man : not a criminal among the three hundred thous- 
and of Ireland's stalwart sons ! (cheers). He stands upon the 
Hill of Tara ! He stands by " The Croppy's grave ; " and 
he has there upon the slopes of that hill, two hundred and 
fifty thousand men, — a quarter of a million of Irishmen before 
him (cheers). Oh, who was able thus to unite Irishmen ? Win* 
was able to inspire them with one soul, — with one high, arid 
lofty and burning aspiration ? Who was able to lift up a 
people whom he had found so fallen, though not degraded, 
that they could scarcely speak words of freedom — of rights— 
10* 



226 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the 11 oughts in their minds ? It was the mighty genius — it 
was the grand, the magnificent mind of Ireland's greatest 3on 
—-of Daniel O'Connell ! (Great cheering.) The Government 
got afraid ; and well they might be. Oh, for the shining arms 
of the Volunteers ! Oh, if on that day of Tara, — if on that 
day of Mullaghmast— oh, if on that day, when the soldiers 
barred the road to Clontarf, — if, on that day, Ireland was 
aroused, where, on the face of the earth, is the race of op- 
pressors that this army of men might not have swept from 
their path in the might of their concentrated patriotism ! 
(Loud cheers.) But Ireland, though united, was unarmed; 
and the brave and the heroic man who said, with so much 
truth, that his highest glory would be to draw the sword for 
his native isle, was obliged to preach conciliation and peace 
and submission to the people. The meeting at Clontarf was 
dispersed, and I may say, with truth, that the dream of the 
repeal of the Union of Ireland with England was dissolved. 
Some days after found O'Connell in prison, where, for months 
he languished ; his health and his heart broken for the sake 
of Ireland ; until at length the iniquitous decree, the blasphe- 
mous judgment was reversed — even by the English House of 
Lords; — and O'Connell, in September, 1844, came forth from 
prison, a free man. But he never recovered from that blow, 
Kever; it was followed by disunion in the councils. Bravo 
and generous hearts to be sure there were, full of the young 
and warm blood. They were for drawing the sword, while 
they had no sword to draw. Ireland unarmed arose in rebel- 
lion ; while near Clontarf, and in and around Dublin, there 
were twenty thousand soldiers ready to pour out the people's 
blood. The glorious dream of emancipation — of emancipa- 
tion for the peojrie — fled away, for the time. Then came the 
hand of God upon the people. Oh well I remember the fear- 
ful scenes that aged father of his country saw before he died ! 
Then came the day when the news spread from lip to lip : 
" There is famine in the land ; and we must all die." So said 
eight millions ; eight millions in that terrible year of '46, — 
eight millions in that awful autumn that came upon us, when 
the people cried for bread and there was no one to break it to 
them. The strong man lay down and died. The tender 
maidens, the pure and aged matrons of Ireland, lay down and 
died. They were found dead by the roadside unburied ; they 
were found in their shallow graves, — scarcely buried. They 
were found crawling to the chapel door that they might 
breath out their souls in one last act of faith and love t<3 
Christ ! 



:he catholic mission. 



Thus aid the Angel of Death spread his wings over the 
land. The Legislator and the Emancipator — the Father of 
Ireland — was compelled to see his people perish ; and he hao 
not the means to save them. O'Connell's heart broke in his 
bosom. And a broken-hearted man, in January, 1847, he 
rose from his bed and crawled to London. With tottering 
step the aged man — the wreck of all that was once so glori- 
ous — appeared before the astonished eyes of Parliament. The 
voice that used to fill the land with the thunders of its elo- 
quence, was now lowered to the merest whisper, — the lan- 
guage of a broken heart. He rose. He pictured before those 
men the agony of Ireland. With streaming eyes he implored 
the mercy of England upon the dying people ; and a subsidy 
to save their lives. That subsidy was denied. Ireland was 
told that she might die. England closed her hand, and the 
heart-broken father of his country was told to go and seek 
some genial clime ; and there he might die ; but there was 
no mercy for his Irish people (cheers). O'Connell set out for 
Rome : the Irish people started for America. O'Connell is in 
Heaven, to-night, I believe in my heart and soul ; and I 
believe also, in my heart and soul, that if anything on earth 
could brighten his joys in Heaven, his joys would be bright- 
ened to know and see the glory, the increased strength, the 
manhocd of Ireland as it exists to-day in America ! (vehem- 
ent cheering). With the instinct of Catholicity he turned 
to Eome, journeying by slow stages ; and, on the loth of 
May, 1S47, he breathed his soul to God, having received all 
the*saeraments of the Church ; and with the names of Jesus 
and Mary on his lips, he died in the city of Genoa, in the 
North of Italy ; and his last words were : " When I am 
dead, take out my heart and send it to Rome ; let my body 
be brought back to mingle with the dust of Ireland ! " The 
Doctors who attended him could not make out what disease 
was upon him. The first men in Ireland, France, Italy — 
came and studied his case. They could not make out what 
sickness cr what infirmity was his. They had never, before, 
been called upon to attend a man who was dying of a broken 
heart. O'ConneH's heart was broken — the heart that was 
sent to Rome — the heart that is enshrined in Rome, to-day — 
was broken for love of Ireland ! 

And, now, what was the genius, what the character of 
this man ? What was the secret of his strength ? I answer 
again : — O'Connell was all that history tells us to-day, and 
all that history shall tell the nations in a thousand years to 
come ; O'Connell was all that, because of the faith, and 



228 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Catholicity that was in him ; — because he was a Catholic of 
the Catholics ; — he was Irish of the Irish ; — and consequently 
the instincts of Ireland, and the heart of Catholic Ireland 
sprang to meet him, and identified themselves with him ; so 
that he made Catholic Ireland as if it had but one heart, and 
one thought, an 1 one mind (cheers). Over all his human 
efforts, over all his tremendous exertions in the cause of free- 
dom — in the sacred cause of liberty — there was ever shining 
over all, the light of Divine Faith ; and he knew that in 
doing battle for Ireland, he was battling for God and for God's 
Church. What made him refuse the " Veto " ? It would not 
have affected him ; it would only have affected the Church ; 
it would only affect the priesthood and the episcopacy of Ire- 
land. What made him refuse that bill of Canning ? It was 
because his Catholic instincts — his Catholic mind and heart 
told him that the State had no business under Heaven to 
interfere in the regulation or in the government of the Church 
(cheers). He gave to the Irish people not only the voice that 
pleaded for their freedom — the magnificent life that was 
devoted to their service, — but he gave something far higher, 
greater than this ; he gave them the bright example of a 
pious, sincere, Catholic man. He showed Ireland, he showed 
the world, that the highest genius can be exalted still more 
when it is consecrated to the sacred cause of the Church, 
and of holy religion. He taught the youth of Ireland the 
lesson they had learned so well from him and from their 
fathers — that the secret of Ireland's strength and of Ire- 
land's ultimate glory and freedom and nationality lies in Ire- 
land's adherence to her glorious old faith (cheers). He 
taught the youth of Ireland that that man alone is sure to 
conquer every enemy in this world who has learned to con- 
quer his own passions and himself among other things. He 
has contributed largely to make a priest of me ; for among 
the tenderest recollections of my youth, — among the things 
that made a deep impression on me as a boy, was when I 
stood in the chapel in Galway, to see the great O'ConneU ; 
the man that shook the world ; that frightened every man 
that crossed his path, — to see that great man coming to eight 
o'clock Mass in the morning ; kneeling among us and receiv- 
ing his Holy Communion ; to watch him absorbed in prayer 
before his God ; to read almost the grand thoughts that were 
passing through that pure mind ; to see him renewing again 
and again, before Heaven, the vows that bound him to his 
religion and to his country (cheers). This, this was the 
grand principle of his life ; this was the secret of his genius ; 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIONS 



229 



this was the inspiration that produced his success. And in 
this devotion well did the Irish correspond with him. What- 
ever he told them to avoid they avoided ; whatever he told 
them to do they did it. Oh ! if God had only left him and 
left us united councils. And if God, in His infinite wisdom, 
had only averted the terrible stroke that prostrated Ireland, 
and broke O'Connell's heart, the glory that we still looked 
forward to might be ours to-day (cheers). But although 
he is dead and gone, his genius, his soul, his heart and his 
hopes, still live in the breast of every true son of Ireland 
(loud and continued cheering). 

You and I will look forward to our brightest human 
hope, after the happiness of Heaven, to behold Ireland 
what he so often wished and prayed she might be, "Great, 
Glorious and Free" (cheers) ! Great, as her history tells us in 
the past she has been ; glorious O'Connell made her, in her 
glorious victory of Emancipation ; free ! oh, there is a God 
of justice in Heaven, — there is a God that treasures up the 
fidelity and sufferings of a nation ; — there is a God that 
accepts the people's sacrifice, and, sooner or later, crowns it. 
To that God do I look, with the same confidence with which 
I look for my own salvation, — I look to thee, oh, God ! this 
night, to send down the crown, the reward of freedom, to 
my glorious country ! (loud and prolonged cheering). And 
when that freedom comes we will know how to use it ; we 
will know how to respect our neighbor's rights, and not 
trample on them ; we will respect our neighbor's property, 
and not plunder him. We will never raise our hand in the 
effort to deprive any people on the earth of that sacred boon 
for which we have sighed so long — the sacred boon of 
national freedom ; because we are Catholics, and the Catho- 
lic Church alone teaches man how to preserve and defend so 
high a gift, and how to use his freedom (great cheering). 

The Rev. lecturer concluded by saying : — I have now to 
announce to you my friends, that on next Thursday evening 
I shall be here again, to deliver a lecture on the <; The Pope's 
Tiaia; its Past, Present, and Future." I may as well tell 
you at once, and you may believe me when I say that my 
whole soul is in that lecture, and that I will consider your 
attendance here on that evening a personal favor to myself 
which I shall be slow to forget. Remember that our Holy 
Father is poor. He has been offered money by Victor Em- 
manuel (hisses), who robbed him ; money which he refused. 
But, fellow-countrymen and fellow-Catholics, we will kiss his 
iiand with greater fervor and devotion, because he has 



230 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



refused to pollute that sacred hand "by touching Victor 
Emmanuel's money (applause). I would rather beg from a 
beggar than take from a robber (laughter). He won't take 
Victor Emmanuel's money; he won't dishonor himself by 
touching it ; but he will honor us by taking ours ; and we 
must give it to him. We know that he wants it, and 
neither the Pope the head of the Catholic Church, nor 
the Catholic Church herself ever yet wanted anything that 
the Irish heart and Irish hand were not ready to give to them 
(cheers). Then, on the evening of next Wednesday week, 
22d of May, I shall come before you again. The subject of 
the lecture on that evening will be a beautiful and interesting 
one, " The Exiles of Erin." I am one of them myself, now ; 
so that I hope to be better able and prepared to give it here 
than if I were at home, — (A voice : "I wish you would stay 
with us ! ") — than if I were speaking in Dublin on that 
subject ; speaking of people that were far away from me. 
I am now in the same category with you ; and " A fellow 
feeling makes us wondrous kind." (Great cheering, amid 
which Father Burke retired). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in Jersey City, on 
Wednesday evening, May 15, in aid of the Building Fund of the New 
Church of St. Patrick.] 



" THE PROMISES OE CHRIST EUFILLED ONLY ET THE CATHOLIC 

CHURCH." 



My Friends : The existence of the Catholic Church is 
the most patent fact in the history of the world. When 
Christ our Lord founded His Church, He emphatically declar- 
ed that she was not to be as a light hidden under a bushel, 
but naming upon the candle-stick, and enlightening every 
man that comes into the house of this world. He declared 
that she was to be as a city built upon the mountain summit, 
that every man, and every wayfarer passing through the ways 
of this world, should behold her and recognize l.er existence. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



231 



If we ask ourselves what was the meaning of our Divine Lord 
speaking of His Church as something so palpable, so unmis- 
takable, forcing itself upon the recognition of every man, no 
matter how reluctant that man may be to behold it, — I 
answer that our Lord meant to fix upon His holy Church cer- 
tain signs by which she should infallibly be known and recog- 
nized among all reasoning men, as the very Church and the 
very spouse of Jesus Christ. Nor is there among the many 
st range mysteries of this world any one thing that more aston- 
ishes me every day, than to behold the earnest man, the high- 
minded man, the believing man, read the Scriptures, and yet 
fail to recognize the Church of Christ in the holy Catholic 
Church. To me this is the strangest intellectual pheno- 
menon in the world ; for certain it is, if we attach any 
meaning whatever to the words of the Son of God, that it 
was in His purpose, and in His fixed, declared intention to es- 
tablish a Church upon this earth. He alludes to it repeatedly 
— over and over again, — calling it now " My Church ;" call- 
ing it again, " My Kingdom" ; at another time speaking of it 
as " the Kingdom of God ;" and making certain, fixed speci- 
fic promises to this Church ; in the fulfilment of which prom- 
ises the world has the convincing proof of the Divine origin 
of our holy Catholic Church and religion. For, dear friends, 
Christ our Lord, was not only the Redeemer, the Teacher of 
mankind, the Atoner of the past ; but He was also the Pro- 
phet of the future. The Scriptures speak of Him and of His 
coming as of a prophet. " On that day," says Moses, "the 
Lord thy God, the God of Israel, will raise up unto thee a 
prophet 'like unto me. Him thou shall hear." That prophet 
was Christ. And all that He prophesied of the future con- 
cerned this Church of His. 

We are come together, this evening, my friends, to 
consider the prophesies of Christ, the promises that He made 
to be fulfilled in the future. We are come together to look 
for their fulfilment; and if we find this fulfilment in the holy 
Catholic Church then we are assembled, such of us as are 
Catholics, to glory in thanksgiving to God for the fulfilment 
of these promises, and such of us as are not Catholics — if 
there be any here — to meditate profoundly, in the name of 
God, upon the necessity of submitting our faith and our love 
to that one and only Church, in whose history in the past, in 
whose existence in the present, are fulfilled all the promises 
that Christ made. 

Now, what were these promises, my friends ? If we search 
the Scriptures, we shall find that they are, principally, the 



232 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



following: Christ, our Lord, emphatically promised that 
His Church should be one, and should be, in this world, 
the very representative of Unity; that no difference of 
religious thought, or opinion, no warring of ideas, no holding 
of contradictory doctrines, was ever to be found in her; but 
that she Has to be on earth a representative of intellectual 
and moral union of the very best kind. And, again, it was 
destined to represent the ineffable unity which binds together, 
in one nature, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This 
was the first promise that Christ, our Lord, made to His 
Church. The second promise that we find in Scripture, made 
to Her was, " that she was to have Him Her Lord, Her God, 
Her Founder, dwelling in the midst of Her, with an abiding 
presence; that He was to be with Her in a peculiar manner, 
as we shall see. The third promise that Christ, our Lord, 
made, was involved in the command, that His Church, and 
Her voice, should be heard all the world over, throughout all 
the nations ; that Her faith was to be preached in every 
tongue, and in every land, and to every people. The last great 
promise that He made to His Church was, that He was to 
abide with her, that every other institution might fail and 
die; that nations might change their governments — might 
lose their very existence, that races might disappear; but 
that the Church which He, the Lord founded, should remain, 
abiding for ever, and for ever ; that systems of philosophy 
might be upheld in one age, and discarded by another ; that 
the physical and scientific truths received to-day, might 
be disaproved to-morrow; but that His Church, founded 
by Him, was to remain immutable, unchangeable — ever 
young, ever vigorous, until the last day of this world's ex- 
istence. 

Behold th*3 four great promises which, as we shall see, are 
distinctly conzeyed in Scripture, and which, as we shall also 
see, are fulfilled in the the Holy Roman Catholic Church; 
and which I assert upon the evidence of history, upon the 
the evidence of our own senses, of our own reason, 
and of our own experience, are not fulfilled in any one 
iota of them outside of the Catholic Church. From which I 
will conclude, that if Christ, our Lord, intended that His 
word should not pass away — that His promises should 
fulfilled — that Church alone represents the Divine origin, or 
foundation by Christ, in which we find the promises fulfilled 
to the letter. 

First of all then, the first prophetic promise was unity. 
The son of God came down from Heaven ; was incarnate by 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



233 



the Holy Ghost, of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. 
He came down from Heaven. He found this world divided 
into a thousand different religious sects, each representing 
not a vestige of truth, but some distinctive form of error. And 
He found all the philosophers wrangling among themselves, 
and divided on the great questions of the existence of a God, 
and of the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. He found 
all the interests in society split up and divided into a thou- 
sand various forms — all at opposition, one with another. But 
He, coming down from Heaven, brought with Him the 
essential unity which is the essence and the nature of His 
God-head, for, the first perfection of the Almighty God, in 
Himself, is essentially and necessarily unity ; — everything 
that is perfect is one. The very idea of perfection involves 
the idea of unity ; that is to say, the one point, the one 
centre around and in which everything of perfection that is, 
is centred; and that perfection, from here and there, con- 
centrates to constitute the Supreme Perfection. Therefore, 
the Almighty God, who is infinite perfection, is, also, infinite 
unity ; and when He assumed to have this second relation to 
our humanity, when coming down from heaven, he added 
our nature to His own, — when He associated God and man, 
He brought down, in that hour of His Incarnation, not only 
the infinite perfection of His Divinity, but also the essential 
unity, by which He is one with the Father. Christ, our 
Lord, God Incarnate, God and Man, was as much united to 
the Father by the essential unity of nature as He was, from 
all eternity, in that Father's bosom upon the Throne of the 
Most High. The fact of His becoming man did not sever, 
for an instant, or separate, that eternal and infinite unity 
by which He was united with God — and by which he 
was God himself. Nay, more ; even as man, He embod- 
ied in himself the principle of unity ; for He took our 
nature — a human soul, a human body, a human intelli- 
gence, a human will, human affections — and everything that 
was man, save and except a human personality. That He 
never took. Why? Because if He took a human personal- 
ity, Christ would have been two and not one. He would 
have been two, viz : The Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity and the human person whom men beheld upon Iho 
earth. But, in order to represent, even in His sacred human- 
ity, the essential principle of unity, He assumed that 
nature into His Divinity ; so that out of the human 
body, the human soul and God — out of these three was 
formed the one person, our Saviour, Christ, and that persoo 



234 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



was Divine. He was still one and only one — even though 
He was God and man. He united them in one. Every 
act of His, even though performed in His humanity, was 
still the act of God; because the person who assumed that 
humanity, and who owned it, and who acted in it was God. 
Why did He do this? Because, dearly beloved, Christ our 
Lord, being God, and infinitely perfect, was essentially one. 
Xow, the design of Christ was to represent upon the earth, 
and to create among men the principle of unity of thought, 
unity of mind, unity of heart, which was so perfect in him- 
self, and which He declared should be represented in His 
Church. Therefore it is that He laid upon all mankind the 
obligation of fraternal charity ; for in charity is a golden 
bond ; and hearts are united. Therefore also, did he impose 
the obligation of faith ; because in faith is an intellectual 
bond ; all minds are united in the union of one belief, of 
one thought. And unity — the unity of God — springs up in 
its representation in that society which is the mystical body 
of Christ. In consequence of all this, the Son of God, the 
Saviour, founded His Church, provided for that Church, 
and promised to her the attribute of unity. For this did 
He pray, the night before He suffered and died. " Oh, 
Father," He said, " I pray for these Thou hast given me that 
they may be one ; — and not only for these," He adds, " but 
for all who through their word shall believe in me, that they 
may be all one as thou, the Father, and I are one ; thou in 
me and I in thee, so that they also may be one."' And 
again He said, "There shall be one fold and one Shepherd." 

And now if, passing from the words of faith, we come to 
reflect with the mere light of reason, does it not stand to rea- 
son — is it not absolutely necessary — that, if the truth exists, 
out of that truth must spring unity ? If the Word of God 
be on earth, that word must be eternal truth. And, if truth, 
it cannot contradict itself. It cannot say yes and no. It can- 
not to-day preach one thing ; to-morrow another. It cannot 
assert one thing at one time as true, and the opposite at some 
other time as equally true. This would be a lie. This would 
be untruth substituted for truth, and error for the unity of 
thought which Christ left upon earth. Wherever the truth is 
then there must be unity as a matter of course. The moment 
division arises, the moment one man contradicts another on 
any subject, human or divine, — that moment the very fact of 
this difference of opinion, of this contradiction, involves the 
presence of error, because one or the other of them must be 
wrong. They cannot be both right. Dissension and division 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



235 



therefore, or breaking up into sects, mutual contradiction, is an 
infallible sign wherever it appears of the existence of religious 
error. I want to impress this upon you : because in this 
our age a strange hallucination has taken possession of men's 
minds. Men recognize the simple fact that in any ordinary 
dealing of life, if two men disagree upon one question, one of 
them must be wrong if the other be right. Both may be wrong; 
either may be wrong ; but both cannot be right. But their 
divergence of opinion, their difference, implies the fact that 
there is wrong — falsehood — between them. Men who see 
this in the ordinary dealings of life, men who recognize it so 
clearly and keenly as a matter of course, will, when it becomes a 
question of religion in which truth or falsehood involves the 
eternal salvation or damnation of man — then they seem to con- 
sider it as a matter of course that there may be diversitiy of 
opinion without the existence of religious untruth. They seem 
to consider that division here, that contradiction here, is a 
matter of no importance. Nay, they go so far as to 
say that it is a good thing, an excellent thing. "The more 
sects we have," they say, "the more religious we are; 
the more men's minds are turned to religion. It is 
a good thing to have so many different forms of belief, 
each contradicting the other ; because, out of that intellectual 
and religious contest men's minds are brought to study 
religion, and they are more filled with the thought of their 
eternal salvation and of the things of God." This is the pop- 
ular error of the day, — a most deplorable error ! Why ? I 
ask you what is the popular idea of religion, at all, in our day ? 
Men say, " Oh, the more disputation goes on, and the more 
difference of opinion there is and the greater number of sects, 
the more men's minds are turned to religion." I deny it ! I 
say a man may study the Scriptures for forty years ; a man 
may turn all his attention to the word of God ; but if during 
all that lifetime of disputation, of assertion, and contradiction 
— if that man has never reached the truth, — if he has never 
touched the truth — if, all this time, he is disputing about his 
view, and that view be a distorted and a false one, I deny that 
that man is approaching to religion. It is an insult to the 
God of truth to say that a man who, all his life is peddling 
about a lie, is doing homage to the essential unity and truth 
of God. No ! Wherever the truth is, unity must be. I do 
not say that unity is truth, because men may be united even 
in their belief of a falsehood. Mind, I do not say absolutely 
that unity is truth. But I do say that truth is unity. I do 
not say that consistency is truth; because persons might be 



236 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



consistent even in a lie. But I do assert that truth is con- 
sistency ; that is to say, it cannot contradict itself nor be 
inconsistent with itself. 

Now, I ask you, where is this promise of unity fulfilled, 
except in the Catholic Church ? There are two hundred 
millions of us, scattered all the world over. There are Catholics 
in every land, speaking every tongue under heaven. Take 
any one instructed Catholic, I don't care of what nation; 
I don't care in what clime you find him; take that one 
instructed Catholic, question him as to his faith, and in that 
man you will find the faith of the two hundred millions that 
are scattered over the world. In the word of that one man 
you find a unit, the representation of the belief that rests in 
the mind of every Catholic throughout the world, just as it is 
spoken by the lips of every other one. I ask you to compare 
this with the miserable multitude of opinions on the most 
important subjects that are found outside the Church. Take 
any one form or denomination of religion — take Protestant- 
ism, or any other form of religious belief outside of the 
Catholic Church ; have they any assurance, or are they able to 
give yon any assurance, that their doctrines of to-day will be 
the doctrines of next year ? No. And the proof lies here— 
that the doctrines of this year were not the doctrines of 
twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, for instance, every 
Episcopalian Protestant in the world believed in the necessity 
of Baptism, and in Baptismal Regeneration. Ten years ago 
the Protestant Church in England declared that Baptismal 
Regeneration formed no part whatever of the doctrines of the 
Church of England. Twenty years ago every Protestant in 
the world believed that the matrimonial bond was indissol- 
uble; and they bowed down so far to the Word of Christ that 
they took their idea of marriage from His Word, which said: 
" Those that God has joined together, let no man attempt to 
divide." To-day, Protestants all the world over, believe in 
the validity and the lawfulness of divorce, under certain circum- 
stances. What is this but changing ? Nay, more ; no sooner 
was the standard of schism raised, three hundred years ago, 
in the Church, than every single leader of the Protestant 
movement broke ofT from his fellow-man, and established a 
religious sect for himself. Names that were never before 
heard: " Zuinglians," "Lutherans," " Calvinists," " Antino- 
mians," "Anabaptists," — and so on, until, in our own day, 
the last, and the ultimate, and the logical residue of Protest- 
antism has subsided into a form of religion which is "pure 
Deism;" acknowledges that there is a God; stops there; and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



237 



asserts that there is no other dogma. Nay, a Protestant 
Bishop of England, a few years ago, made use of these 
words : " It is the proudest boast of our Church of England 
that she has no dogma;" that is to say, no fixed form of 
opinion. I do not say these words, nor any words, nor do I 
think in my mind any thought — much less express it — which 
would be painful or disrespectful to any man; but I ask you, 
my friends, are not these the facts ? Are they not there 
before your eyes ? In the Catholic Church, any one 
instructed Catholic who knows his religion represents the doc- 
trine of the Church. You never hear of those in the Catholic 
Church contradicting each other in matters of doctrine, of 
dogma, or belief. You never hear of strange or unheard of 
propositions propounded from a Catholic pulpit. You may 
search the history of eighteen hundred and seventy-two years 
and you will find the Catholic Church always preaching, 
always speaking, clearly, emphatically, fearlessly on every 
question; never refusing to give an answer, when she is called 
upon, on any question of faith or morals. After eighteen 
hundred and seventy-two years, the student of history turns 
over page after page of historic record, to all the enunciations 
of the Church, in her Bishops, in her Popes, in her Councils; 
and nowhere can he find a single instance, of a single line, 
in which the Church taught a single contradiction to herself, 
in which the Church ever denied one tittle or iota of her pre- 
vious doctrine, or ever changed one single feature of her 
Divine teaching. We, therefore, are forced to believe that, 
if consistency be a proof of truth, if unity be the soul of truth, 
— the sign of truth wherever it is found, — that that consist- 
ency, and that unity are to be found in the Catholic Church. 

And I wish to invite your attention, not so much to past 
times, nor to other lands, — for I am speaking now to intelli- 
gent men, — but in coming to this new country, I have found, 
not only among my own countrymen, but I have foiled in 
every grade of society, and in every religious denomination 
that I have met with, I have found a bright, sharp, shrewd, 
and high order of intellectuality, and of intelligence. To that 
intelligence of America I appeal. I ask you, my friends, if 
we, Catholics, were to withdraw from among you, if every 
Catholic in America were to leave the land to-morrow, an I 
leave you to yourselves — would not the idea, the very idea, 
of religious opinion, have departed from among you ? Try 
to realize to yourselves what it would be, if we were to-mor- 
row to go out from the land, and not leave a single Roman 
Catholic in America? Would there be a man left in the 



238 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



land that could proclaim his faith, and point to a society of 
his fellow-men who hold that same faith, in every detail of 
doctrine which he holds ? Not one. There is no unity of 
thought, much less intellectual obedience, outside the Cath- 
olic Church. But when we enter her glorious halls and cross 
her golden threshholds, oh, how magnificent is the picture of 
unity that rises before the eyes of our souls ! There do we 
see two hundred millions of men, rich and poor, gentle and 
simple, intellectual and uneducated, highest and lowest ; and 
forth from these two hundred millions of lips and hearts 
comes one and the selfsame note — the voice of faith and the 
praise of God. One sacrifice in every land ; one word in 
every country ; one testimony to the same faith ; and this 
brought down to us without the slightest contradiction for 
nearly two thousand years, since the day that Christ arose 
from the dead. Oh, how magnificent is the image — how 
splendid the picture of unity that I contemplate, when, pass- 
ing from the millions, I enter the sanctuary of the holy ones 
in the order of the hierarchy, the fittest, the brightest repre- 
sentation of the harmony of Heaven ! There the monk and 
the nun, consecrated, fill their own station and their own 
office. There we ascend from monk and nun, and we find 
the robed priest on the altar, and the preacher in the pulpit. 
Above them, again, higher in jurisdiction, in authority, 
approaching to the supreme head, we find the Bishops of the 
Church of God assembled in council, and eight hundred 
mitred heads taking thought and expressing and testifying 
to the Church's faith. Higher still we come to another order 
representing the clergy of Rome — of the city of Rome — the 
most ancient in the world, and the most honored : seventy- 
three Cardinals around the Papal throne, — men who have 
received from the Church of God the extraordinary power 
to lay their hands on the anointed, and to designate the suc- 
cessor of Peter. Highest of all, seated upon his Pontifical 
throne, is the representative, the viceroy of God, holding the 
keys in one hand, holding the rod of jurisdiction in the other, 
and with one arm governing the whole flock of the Catholic 
Church, according to the word : 3 There shall be one fold and 
one shepherd." Above him^-for we must yet lift up our eyes 
from earth, for he is but a mere man — above him, but near 
him, standing close to him, upholding him, confirming hkn 
in faith, crowning him with the supremacy of the Church, the 
great Invisible Head whom the eye of Faith alone can behold 
in Peter and in Peter's successor — the Lord Jesus Christ^— 
the true head — the one great fountain, pastor and ruler of tjie 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



239 



great Catholic Church. How great is that design, how 
grand is that order, how beautiful that harmony, how splen- 
did that gradation from rank to rank, from order to order, 
from dignity to dignity, until all are concentrated upon one 
man on earth, — because that one man represents the Invisible 
Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. Behold unity ! Behold the 
reflection of the divinity of God in its ineffable unity, shin- 
ing forth in the beauty and in the harmony of our Holy 
Church and our Holy religion ! 

The next promise of Christ was His own abiding presence 
with this Church. For this He prayed : " Father, let them be 
one, — even as Thou and I are one."' So, also, did He say : "I 
am with you all days : until the consummation of the world." 
" Take heed," He says ; " although I leave you, it will be only 
for a little time. A little time and you shall not see me ; but 
after a little time you shall see me again ; for I will not leave 
you orphans ; but I will come to you, and I will remain with 
you, and abide with you all days until the consummation of 
the world ! " What did He mean ? The man who is outside 
the Church and who denies His glorious sacramental and real 
presence on our altar, — that man says : ' : He only meant that 
He would remain on earth by the union of grace in every holy 
soul ; that He would remain upon the earth with His elect, 
guiding them, preserving them from evil ;" — and so on. 
But I ask you, can this be the meaning of the Word of Christ, 
when He said : <; I am with you !" Was He not always with 
His elect from the beginning ? Every man that loves the 
Lord — that loves God — has God ; for God is love. And from 
the beginning — from the day that Adam repented of his sin, 
— all through the four thousand years before the coining of 
our Lord, — everybody knew that he who loved God was 
united to God by that charity, so far ; and if He meant noth- 
ing more than this — than His presence by Divine grace — than 
His abiding presence with His elect — there was no necessity, 
under Heaven, for Him to say the word- : " I am with you all 
days : until the consummation of the world/' It was well 
understood that He was with them. He, himself, had said, 
elsewhere : " If any man love me, the Father will come to 
him, and I will come to him ; and we will take up our dwell- 
ing with him." Where, then, was the necessity of reitera- 
ting the promise and putting it in such a formal manner : " I 
am with you all days, even until the consummation of the 
world '? " Did He confer anything by this promise more 
than was given to the men of the old law ? Xothing. In 
the Protestant sense, He gave nothing ; because He was 



240 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



already under that dispensation with those that loved Him. 
He either meant nothing when He said those words, or H8 
meant to indicate some peculiar, some special, some wonder- 
ful manner in which He was to be with His Church. Did He 
indicate, elsewhere, what the manner of His remaining was to 
be ? Yes. The night before He suffered He took bread into 
His holy and venerable hands. He said to His Apostles: 
" Take and eat ye all of this, for this is my body." And 
taking wine, He breathed upon it and said : " Drink ye all of 
this, for this is my blood of the new and Eternal Testament, 
which shall be shed for many unto the remission of sins." Then 
to the Apostles He said : " That which you have seen me do, 
do ye also in commemoration of me." And He gave them the 
power of changing bread and wine into the very substance of 
His body and His blood. He gave them the power to sub- 
stantiate Him under the appearance of bread and wine — to 
substantiate God ; and nothing remained but what was neces- 
sary to conceal the Redeemer from the eyes of flesh, in order 
that man might have the merit of faith ; because "faith is the 
argument of things that appear not." Thus did He remain. 
And if He did not remain thus, then I say He meant nothing, 
— no privilege — no special endowment to His Church — on the 
day that He promised her that He would remain with her 
forever unto the consummation of the world. Where do we 
find this presence? Only upon the altars and within the 
tabernacles of the Catholic Church. 

Here again I appeal to your own sense and reason. A 
6tranger coming to your land, — a stranger from some Pagan 
country, who never heard of the special doctrines of Chris- 
tianity, — goes through the length and breadth of this Ameri- 
can land ; he enters any temple of religion, and he finds four 
walls. A church, built in a church's form, but he sees no sign 
of life ! There are no adorers there, bowing down to indicate 
by their adoration the presence of God. There are no lights 
burning around on the altar: there is no altar ; no place of sac- 
rifice ! There is no presence thereto speak a word to him of 
God. He may see perhaps verses of Scripture written round 
on the walls. He may see perhaps the Ten Commandments lif- 
ted up over a table. They may indicate to him the Word of 
God; but the presence of God he sees no sign whatever to show» 
No life is there; no living thing is there ! He enters a Cath- 
olic Church in any one of our cities. The moment he crosses 
the threshold, the twinkling of the lighted lamp, before the 
altar, catches his eye. There is motion. At least there is 
Borne idea of sacrifice. Something is being actually consumed 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



241 



or offered to some unseen power. Who is that power. Who 
is it to whom that altar has been built up ? Who is it for 
whom that place of residence has been prepared ? Who is it ? 
He turns and he sees some poor old woman, some aged man 
or perhaps some Catholic youth, bowed down to the earth, 
making visible and sensible signs, such as men make to God 
and to Him alone, — as kneeling themselves in adoration, pros- 
trating themselves, and sinking into the nothingness of their 
own being before the mighty being whom they worship. And 
the thought must be forced upon that stranger's mind : 
" Here, at least, I have evidence of the presence of a God — a 
people's God." If, then, that presence be among the promises 
that Christ made to His Church, even to the Pagan and the 
stranger, the fulfilment of this promise is demonstrated only 
in the Holy Catholic Church. 

Here again, as I admire the unity of her faith, the unity 
of her worship, the unity of her praise, the unity of her sac- 
ramental and liturgical language,— here again do I see, rising 
before me, when I enter into thy walls, O Church of God, the 
magnificent presence of Jesus Christ ! Oh, what an argument 
of Divine love for man that God should remain among His 
creatures for ever! Oh, what an argument for the dig- 
nity, the value, the grandeur of our human nature, that the 
Eternal, infinite God, should make it His daily dwelling-place 
to be in the midst of mankind ! Oh, how wonderful the ful- 
filment here of all those ancient prophecies in which the 
Lord said : " My delight and my joy is to be among the 
children of men ! " 

The third promise that Christ made to His Church was, 
that Her voice should be heard in every land and that she 
should grow among the people until the ancient words of the 
prophet David should be fulfilled: "Unto every land, the 
sound of their voice has gone forth, and their words are 
heard, even to the farthest ends of the earth." Where is this 
promise fulfilled? He called the twelve, and said to them: — 
" My friends, before you lies the whole world. It is made up 
of many nations, many tribes and races of men. They are 
all hostile to you. They will cast you forth. They will 
pat you to shame, and to all ignonimy for my sake. They will 
pat you to death, and consider they have done a good thing. 
Yet, now, I say unto you, go forth among them, and preach, 
and teach all nations of the earth." Mintes, docentes omnes 
gentes. Their mission was to the whole world. No longer 
was the truth of the presence of God, or the assistance, of the 
sanctity or strength of Divine Grace, to be confined to one na- 
il 



9 



242 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

tion or one people. No longer were certain narrow boundaries 
to restrict the action and the presence of God among men. No 
longer was one nation or tongue permitted alone to possess the 
truth ! No ; but forth were those twelve to go, unto every 
land, unto every nation, bringing to them the message that 
He gave to them: " Go forth," He said, "and teach unity!" 
Behold the message of truth, " Go forth and baptize them ! " 
Behold the message of sacramental grace and sanctity. And, 
lo, they went forth, and, multiplied by the spiritual generation, 
they created their own successors by the imposition of hands. 
Grace was poured abroad from them upon the people, in light 
and sanctity, within the sanctuary, unto our brethren in 
power and jurisdiction. And so the Church of God spread 
herself into every land, and preached the Gospel to every 
nation. Where is the country that has been able to shut 
itself out from her? They have built up in their hatred to 
the truth — they have built up ramparts between them and 
the Church — ramparts cemented in the blood of martyrs ! 
They have piled up the dead bodies of the slain to defend 
them from the approach of this great and awful Church of 
God. Nowhere, among the nations, has the Red Sea of 
martyrs' blood been able to withold, or to keep back the holy 
Jesuit missionary from going into every land, and proclaim- 
ing the glory of Jesus Christ. Where has the monk, the 
majestic, the apostolic man ever been frightened or turned 
back because he saw the martyr's crown and the martyr's 
blood appear together? No; but he has followed in the track 
of every conqueror ! No ; but he has launched into the most 
dangerous and unknown seas ! No; but he was of those who 
were the first companions of the great, the mighty intellect, 
that saw in the far West the glorious vision of the mighty 
country which he came to discover; and among his first com- 
panions were the children of St. Francis and St. Dominic ! 
Among the first sights which the Indians of America beheld 
was the Dominican habit which you behold upon me here to- 
night. The message was preached upon this land. A grain of 
mustard-seed was cast upon every soil. Did it increase ? Did it 
multiply ? Yes, everywhere. Where every other sect, where 
every, other religion came, they came to a stand-still, and 
they dwindled away into nothingness. The Catholic Church, 
to-day, maintains all the vigor, all the strength, all the 
energy — and commands all the strength, all the energy, 
all the devotion which were hers in the days when the 
martyrs stood within the Coliseum of Rome, to testify by 
their blood to the faith — just as in the days when Las Casas 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



243 



crossed the Atlantic, and, while standing before the King's 
council in Madrid, pleaded for the cause of liberty, the cause 
of justice, the cause of liberty to the Indian ! 

This is acknowledged even by Protestant writers them- 
selves. " It is a singular fact," says the great historian, Mao 
aulay, "that for the last three hundred years (since the day 
when the nations first separated from the Church of God), the 
Protestant religion has never made one step in advance ; has 
never gained a convert ; has never converted a province nor a 
people. They are to-day (he says) just as they were the day 
before Luther died." Now, I will add — and, pardon me, if I 
shall endeavor to prove it to you — it has gone back ! The 
Protestant Archbishop of Westminster, whom I once knew as 
a distinguished clergyman of the Church of England, remark- 
ed, some time ago : " It is a singular fact that the only prog- 
ress (if you will) that Protestantism has made since the day 
of its establishment, consists in lopping off, on every side, 
every point of doctrine." For instance; Luther believed in 
the presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist. He 
never denied it, as you know. Those who came immediately 
after him, cut of — in fact, denied it, virtually. Their suc- 
cessors believed, if not in the sacramental nature, at least in 
the indissoluble nature of matrimony. This they have cut on* 
in our own day. So, too, with Baptismal Regeneration. 
They have even denied, on the other side, in our own day, the 
necessity of a fixed form of belief: to-day that is becoming 
most unpopular. So that, in truth, the Anglican liturgy is so 
unpopular that the Athanasian Creed is rejected because it 
makes a fixed, definite confession of the two great doctrines of 
Christianity, namely, the doctrine of the Trinity and of the 
divinity of the Son of God. Men say they believe ; but there 
are places in England, to-day, where, if the rector or curate 
read the Athanasian Creed from the pulpit, the best part of 
his congregation would stand up and walk out. Whence 
comes this ? It comes from this, that the world will not 
accept Protestantism, unless it be made to mean Latitudina- 
rianism, — anything, or nothing. The world then, that refuses 
to accept Protestantism, unless on condition of denying every- 
thing, stands before the Catholic Church, as it has stood for 
eighteen hundred years ; and to that world this great Church 
of God will not, because she cannot, yield or sacrifice one sin- 
gle iota of her doctrine — one single word of that message of 
truth which the God of Truth has put into her hands, — into 
her hands, and into her soul. One would imagine, therefore, 
that this Catholic Church of ours should not be able to stand 



244 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



at all, — accused of so many things that are true, accused of so 
many things that are false — accused of so many things that 
are true ; among them that she is exclusive ; perfectly true! 
that she has no mercy upon any one who ventures to disagree 
with her in any article of faith, but cuts him off, — excises 
him, says " Anathema ;" " let him be cut off ; let him be 
accursed." Perfectly true ; — as true as that the discipline of 
the Catholic Church is accused of having an iron rule, mould- 
ing every intellect in one mould, in matters pertaining to re- 
ligion. Perfectly true. The Catholic Church is accused of 
desiring to intermeddle with education, to draw, as much as 
she can, the education of children into her own hands, and to 
muster the consciences of her people into her own hands. 
Perfectly true ; perfectly true. " Guilty ; guilty, my lords !" 
It is true : there is no gainsaying it. Why does the Catholic 
Church do this ? Because she happens to have the truth of 
Christ. Instead of paring down that truth, to bring it to a 
level — as has happened to the English Church, to-day — she 
holds men up to her doctrine by the hair of the head, and 
draws them up to that divine truth which she cannot change ; 
and which you cannot change ; — for you must admit it. The 
Catholic Church is charged with contriving to control edu- 
cation. It is true ; because, " the child is father to the man ;" 
and it is her duty to make her men, men of God. She begins 
with the child, to make them children of God ; and she must 
begin in childhood ; if she does not, she never can make a 
religious man. The Catholic Church is accused of moulding 
intellects and consciences into one mould, drawing everything, 
as it were, into one groove. Yes, that one mould, that one 
groove, is the divine truth of Christ. You don't wish to fit 
into it unless you are made conformable to the Son of God in 
the possession of the truth, which is one in the possession of 
grace, in admitting the restraints that are necessary to sanc- 
tify and sweeten your lives ; unless you are made thus con- 
formable to the image of the Son of God, you will not have 
part or fellowship with Him, in the glory of the kingdom of 
His father. The Church does this because she cannot help 
it. 

Then the Church is accused of many things that are false; 
she is accused, for instance, of being the enemy of education ; 
and strange to say, I have heard — more than once — in England 
this accusation made to myself against the Church. And I 
have heard the same men, within five minutes, charge the 
Catholic Church with being too grasping ; with having too 
much to say about education ; talking too much about it, mak- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



245 



ing too much fuss about it ; and, within the same five min- 
utes charging her with being the enemy of all education. 
The Catholic Church is accused of favoring ignorance, in order 
that she may keep her hold upon the people. You know that is 
false. The Catholic Church knows well that her greatest enemy 
without her is the ignorance of the world that refuses to 
look at her ; that the greatest difficulty within her is the 
ignorance of her own — the uneducated portion of her children. 
The greatest difficulty without the Church is not the intelli- 
gence of the world. No : from the highly educated, from 
the highly accomplished Protestant, the Catholic Church gets 
the generous tribute which history bears to her. There is not 
a Catholic writer that has paid over and over such generous 
homage to the glory of the Catholic Church as she has received 
from the highest Protestant writers, that is to say men of the 
highest cultivation and the highest intelligence. The opposi- 
tion that she receives, — the hatred she encounters, exists in 
the enmity, the ignorance of those who are within her sanct- 
uary, within her own pale. Her educated children in propor- 
tion as they are educated, — in proportion as they receive 
knowledge and rise to the fullness of intellectual excellence,— 
in the same proportion does the Church lean upon them — ap- 
peal to them — take a firm hold of them; in precisely the same 
proportion are they the grand defenders and missionaries of 
their holy mother. And the highly educated Catholic is 
always the best Catholic. The more he knows, the more will 
he prize and love that Church in which he lives. The more 
he knows the more is he fitted to enter into the field of intel- 
lectual strife, and to do battle for the faith of the Holy Catho- 
lic Church, in which he lives. 

The Catholic Church is accused of being the enemy of 
progress. Now I would like to know what this means. I 
believe that many men, in this day of ours, speak of pro- 
gress ; and they actually do not know what it means. 
Does it mean railroads ? Well, certainly, yes ; railroads are 
a sort of progress. Thirty or forty miles an hour is certainly 
a more rapid form of advance than travelling along at the 
rate of seven or eight. Does progress mean electric tele- 
graphs? Cotton mills? Steamships? Why, what has the 
Catholic Church to say to these things ? I hear men talking 
of the Catholic Church as the enemy of progress ; and the 
only thing these men mean by progress is the making of a 
sewing-machine, or something of that kind. What has the 
Catholic Church to say to these things ? Why she is very 
much obliged to the world for them : she is very much 



246 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



obliged to the men who build railroads, make locomotives,— 
to the men who will build a line of steamships. Why, these 
means will bring her Bishops to Rome, to take council with 
the Pope ; and will send them home again. They will take 
advantage of the electric telegraph. Why, these wires 
Hashed to the very ends of the earth the decisions of the 
Vatican Council ; and every man was brought into commu- 
nion with that instantaniety of thought which is in the unani- 
mity, and a necessity, of Catholicity. So that to say that the 
Catholic Church is opposed to progress, is a lie. But there is 
another kind of progress; and the Catholic Church is opposed 
to it. God is opposed to it. What is it ! It is progress of 
an intellectual kind. It is progress that involves that diabol- 
ical " Spiritualism," — dealing with spirits, whether good or 
bad, — the superstition that arises from it ; and the progress 
that results in what is called the doctrine of "free love ; " — 
the progress that unsexes the woman ; that sends her into 
dissecting rooms, or such unwomanly places, and there 
debauches her mind, while she is said to be in the pursuit of 
knowledge. The progress that asserts that children are to 
be brought up from their earliest infancy in such independ- 
ence, that they are allowed to give the lie to their father or 
their mother ; the progress that would assert that politics is 
a game that men are to enter into for their own private 
aggrandizement and wealth ; the progress that would 
assert that, in commercial intercourse, a man may do a 
" smart thing," although there may be a little tinge of 
roguery or injury to a neighbor in it ; the progress that 
would assert that every man is free to think as he likes on 
every subject ; — all this the Church is opposed to. For, if 
the Church were not able to speak to you, — to lay hold of 
you with bit and bridle, — bind fast the jaws of this society, 
in this age of ours ; — if the Church were not in the midst of 
you, with the monk and the nun, whose consecration never 
changes, whose obligation never changes, from age to age, 
from the cradle to the grave, — where would you be ? Where 
would you be if this strong conservative power of the Church 
of God were not in the midst of you? Society would, long 
since, have been broken up, — reduced to its original ele- 
ments of chaos, of confusion, and of sin. 

The fourth promise made to the Church was that she 
was to last forever. " I have built my Church upon a rock," 
He said ; " and the gates of hell shall never prevail against 
it." "I am with you until the end of the world. I will 
send my Spirit to breathe upon you, to lead you unto all 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



247 



truth, and abide with you forever." Everything else may 
perish ; the Catholic Church must remain as she was from 
the beginning, as she is now, and as she shall be unto the 
end. The Catholic Church must remain the same. Wo 
Catholics know this ; it is an instinct with us. We know 
that the Catholic Church can never be in danger. We 
deplore the calamities of this age ; for instance, when we 
see the Pope persecuted ; and Ave grieve when we see him 
robbed of that which the nations conferred upon him. We 
grieve when we see poverty, misery, or oppression ; we 
grieve when we hear of a persecution in China or Japan, and 
that a score of Jesuits or other missionaries have been slaugh- 
tered or sent to prison. We grieve for a thousand things 
like these ; but who was ever tempted to think that the 
Church was in danger, or that anything could happen to 
her ? And we know that everything else may perish ; but 
we knew that she must remain ; we have the evidence of it 
in her history. She may perisli in this nation or in that ; but 
she springs up, by the inevitable destiny of her being, to 
new life elsewhere. She perished, many centuries ago, in 
the very cradle in which she was founded, — in Palestine, — 
in the Oriental countries ; but she took possession of Western 
Europe. She seems, now, to be persecuted — even, perhaps, 
unto perishing — in some of the most ancient Catholic nations 
of Europe. Spain and Italy are in danger. If they fail, the 
loss will be theirs, not the Church's. And by so much as 
the Church loses in one land she gains in another. And 
while we behold the Bishops persecuted, the priests driven 
out, the Churches tottering into ruins, in the fair cities of 
Italy, we behold, across the Western wave, — in this new 
land of America, Catholicity springing up, side by side w T ith 
the great material development of the mighty land ; — Cath- 
olicity the only power in the land ; the only religion in 
the country that keeps up, stride by stride, pace by 
pace, with the mighty material development of young 
America. Twenty years ago, there was in this Hud- 
son county but one little Catholic chapel ; to-day there 
are nineteen Catholic churches, — of what form — w r hat 
magnificence — look round and see. What does this mean ? 
It means that where a nation is faithless, Almighty God 
permits His curse to fall upon that nation ; and the curse of 
God fails upon that nation in the day when she drives out 
her Catholic faith from her. But, so sure as that pilgrim of 
God is driven from one society, so sure does Almighty God 
send down on another people and another race the 



248 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



grace to open their hearts and their arms to the Church, 
His spouse, that wanders over the earth with truth 
upon their lips; that walks upon the earth, a thing of 
supreme and celestial beauty, destined to go forth and 
to conquer until the end of time. And so must she 
remain for ever ; ever growing in the faith of her children ; 
ever growing in their devotion ; ever renewing, like the 
eagle from day to day, her divinely infused strength and 
power ; ever testing every system of philosophy ; ever denoun- 
cing every form of error ; ever proclaiming every form of 
law; and laboriously and patiently, — the Alma Mater, 
bringing out, with skilful and patient hand, in the confess- 
ional, and her altar, in all the influence of the sacraments, 
— bringing out, in every individual soul that she touches, the 
divine and God-like image of Christ. 

Such do we behold thee, — such do I see thee, O royal 
mother ! O royal mother ! even as Paul at Tarsus, beheld 
thee, — thee whom Christ loved, aud for whom He laid down 
His life, that He might present thee to himself, a glorious 
Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, but 
holy and perfect in thy sanctity. Such do I behold thee, as 
the prophet beheld thee, when he said : " Thou wast made 
of exceeding beauty, and thou wast made of perfect beauty, 
because of thy beauty which I behold in thee, saith the 
Lord." As such do I recognize thee, O mother, who hast 
begotten me by the simple act of Christ. As such do I 
recognize thee, O mighty influence, sanctifying all that thou 
dost approach. As such do I behold thee, with all the 
brightest intelligences of the world, in times past and in 
times present bowing down before thy altars, and accepting 
thy message of divine truth. As such do I see thee, when, 
turning from the past, I look into the future, and behold thee, 
with a crown of supreme and celestial beauty, shining in the 
unity of thy faith, and resplendent in the glory of thy 
sanctity ; the crowning blessing of this glorious Western 
land, that in these later days of the world's existence, will 
put forth all her strength, and all her intelligence to uphold 
the glory of Christ and of His Church. 

One word before I leave. I came here this evening on 
behalf of this very cause of which I am speaking to you, — for 
a Catholic Church which is being built in this city by my 
respected friend, Father Hennessy. Of course, a priest, 
alone, — when he faces the task of building a church, — under- 
takes a tremendous obligation ; and, generally speaking, gets 
himself up to his eyes in debt. But because of the divine 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



249 



principle that underlies everything in the Church, he knows 
that no matter how gigantic the undertaking, he is sure to 
succeed : because the Church, for which he labors, never 
dies — never fails. To whom does he look for support ? He 
looks to his people; and he looks especially to those among 
his people who have learned in the Catholic Church, under 
the influence of her graces, to uphold the sacred cause of 
Temperance. He appeals to the generous-hearted people who 
have never been wanting in magnanimity, nor in truthfulness, 
nor in talent, nor in tenderness of heart, — Irish Catholics, 
all the world over, — whom the demon of intemperance would 
fain touch with his hell-born hand, to dry up every highest 
and most generous thing in them by the breath of his infernal 
lips. You have risen, Oh, my brothers, out of his power ; you 
have shaken him off, and you have declared, by your associa- 
tion, that, in this land of America, the Irishman will be the 
intellectual, generous, high-minded temperate man, of whom 
the Church will be proud, and of whom the State never will be 
ashamed. You have made yourselves the apostles of this 
virtue, which, next to your faith, is the grandest of virtues, 
and without which even faith itself is of no avail. A drunk- 
ard is rather a disgrace to the faith which he professes, and 
a stumbling block in the path of those who would fain uphold 
that faith. Believe me, therefore, my brethren, for you do I 
come, and for you I would willingly lay down my life, to 
strengthen you in this glorious resolution, which, in this 
larger Ireland of America, will build up the glory of our 
people, and will bring them up as an influence in the land in 
everything that is highest and most eminent and most intel- 
lectual. And all this united in one word, when I say the 
sober, temperate Irishman. Persevere, in the name of God : 
persevere for the sake of home; for the loved ones there — 
for the family, for the nation. Persevere for the sake of your 
own souls ; persevere for the sake of that Church in which 
you live and in which you believe; that when she puts the 
words of her evidence on my lips, she may be able to point to 
you and say : " If you want to know what sanctity is in 
the Catholic Church, — if you want to know what powerful 
influence is in her, — behold her children: she is not ashamed 
of them; they are the strongest argument of the power 
of her voice." 

11* 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture dedvered by the Rev. Father Burue, on the occasion 
of his reception by the Catholic Temperance Union of New Jersey, 
at Jersey City, Wednesday evening, May 15.] 

" TE1LPERAXCE." 



Men qf Ireland, Men of the Catholic Faith: I 
have to thank you for the compliment that you have paid me 
this evening ; but if it was presented as a compliment to me, 
I should be ashamed to receive it, for I am not worthy of so 
mnch honor. But it is not to me, personally, that you are 
paying this tribute of respect. It is the manhood of Ire- 
land that rallies around the representatives of Ireland's priest- 
hood (cheers). It is the manhood of Ireland, far away from 
our native land, honoring and loving in America what 
Ireland has honored and loved at home, — her devoted 
and loving priesthood (renewed cheers). The priest- 
hood of Ireland has always devoted itself to God and 
to the manhood of Ireland and the manhood of Ire- 
land has always returned their priests' devotion with a 
nation's love. I could not help feeling and thinking this 
evening, as you brought me home, how other people are 
persecuting their priests, as if they were their enemies; 
while the men of Ireland rally round their priest, because 
they know he is their friend (loud cheers.) "We are not 
ashamed, men of Ireland, of the land that bore us, — the 
most glorious land on the face of the earth, and the best 
race of men oh the face of the earth (applause). God forbid 
that we should be ashamed of our country or of our religion. 
I have three toasts, if you will, to propose to you this eve- 
ning. Ireland's religion is the Catholic religion; she has 
been faithful to her religion in weal and in woe ; and I ask 
you to give one big cheer for our Catholic faith (The Tem- 
perance men did give " one big cheer" multiplied by nine). 

That Catholic faith that we profess brings us to the grace 
pf God ; and the grace of God brings us the virtue of tern- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



251 



perance. The temperate man means the man who wishes to 
preserve the grace of God and to save his soul. The temper- 
ate man means the man who wishes to be happy in this world 
and to secure his happiness in the world to come. The drunk- 
ard loses his happiness here, and gains eternal misery hereafter. 
The temperate man means the man that surrounds himself 
with all the blessings of home and all the comforts of his fam- 
ily, — that creates for himself a position in this world, saves 
his health, saves his reputation ; and, while he makes himself 
happy in this world, in the midst of his friends and his family, 
he secures by his religion the happiness of eternity. The tem- 
perate Irishman means the man that gives fair play to the 
intellect that the Almighty God, has given to every Irishman 
and that gives fair play to the generosity of heart with which 
the Almighty God has endowed every Irishman. The tem- 
perate man means the man who is an honor to his country — 
an honor to his family and an honor to the Church of God 
that owns him. The temperate Irishman means the man 
whom Almighty God created to command his fellow-men in 
this world, by the impress of His grace and of His power 
(loud cheers). No man ought to be so temperate as the Catho- 
lic Irishman ; because the Catholic Irishman, in Confession 
and Communion, has his God to help him, and to keep him in 
the right way. Therefore, as you have given a cheer for our 
Church, — our holy religion, I now ask you to give a cheer for 
the virtue that that religion creates, — a cheer for Catholic 
Irish temperance (tremendous cheering). As the Catholic 
Church creates the virtue of temperance, so Irish temperance 
will create a return of that long-departed vision of Ireland's 
greatness. Irish temperance will make Ireland a nation once 
more (renewed cheering). It was Father Matthew, in '39, 
that prepared the way for O'Connell in '43. It was O'Connell 
in '43, that was able to make the blood-stained power of Eng- 
land tremble for its hold on Irish soil (loud cheering). And 
to achieve this, we, men of Irish blood and of Irish birth, — 
if we only consent to practice this one great virtue, — this 
necessary virtue of temperance, — the Irishman in America 
will make his influence felt upon the goverment at home. 
The man who is exiled for his love for his country will aid 
that country to achieve her independence and her nationality, 
by the strength, the power, and the influence of his genius and 
of his virtue (loud cheers). 

I associate with this virtue of temperance, which I preach 
to you, — I associate with that all my hopes, not only for 
your individual domestic happiness, — all my hopes of your 



252 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



eternal salvation; — but I associate with this virtue of temper- 
ance all my hopes of my native land, — for her future happi- 
ness, — for her future glory (great enthusiasm). Before we 
separate, therefore, I ask you, in the name of God, in the 
name of the Church of God, to be firm in your professions and 
in your practice of temperance. God made the Irishman a 
royal-hearted and a royal-minded man ; and the devil comes 
in to destroy that heart and that mind by the terrible vice 
ctf drunkenness and intemperance. Give yourselves fair play. 
Give your minds and your hearts fair play in this land of 
America ; and my faith upon you that, in ages to come, if 
not in a few years, the sons of Ireland, the religion of Ire- 
land, the virtue of Ireland, the bravery of Ireland, will not 
only take possession of this American soil, but it will also 
achieve the glorious task so long reserved, but in the designs 
of Providence, no doubt, destined some day or other to be 
acomplished, — that grand and glorious task of old Ireland's 
independent nationality (tremendous cheering, again and 
again renewed). You have cheered the Church because she 
created temperance : you have cheered the cause of temper- 
ance for its own sake ; and now I will ask you to give one 
rousing cheer at least, for that which Irish temperance will 
one day or another create, — the National independence, the 
glory, the freedom of the loved and venerated land of Ire- 
land. [Here the temperance men gave a cheer loud enough 
and strong enough to " rouse " the " sleepers " on the Cam- 
dem and Amboy railroad.] And now, boys, both you and I 
feel a little tired : we all want a sleep. I am thankful that 
we are members of the Temperance Society, for we will get 
up to-morrow morning without a headache (loud and contin- 
ued cheering, amid which Father Burke retired). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev Father Burke, in the Academy 
of Music, New York, on Thursday evening, May 16, in aid of the 
" New York Catholic Union Fund," intended as a gift to his Holiness 
the Pope.] 

" THE POPE'S TIARA ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE." 



May it Please Your Grace (Archbishop McCloskey). 
Ladies and Gentlemen: — The subject on which I propose to 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



253 



address you is: " The Pope's Tiara, or Triple Crown; its 
Past, its Present, and its Future." We read of a celebrated 
orator of Greece, that the grandest effort he ever made was 
in a speech which he pronounced upon a crown. I wish I 
had, to-night, the genius or the eloquence of Demosthenes; 
for my theme, my crown, is as far beyond the glory of the 
crown of which he spoke, as my thoughts and my eloquence 
are inferior to his. 

Among the promises and prophetic words that we read 
in Scripture concerning our Divine Lord and Redeemer, 
we read that it was prophesized of Him that He should be a 
King; that He should rule the nations; that He should 
wear a crown ; and that His name was to be called " The 
Prince of Peace." He came ; He fulfilled all that was written 
concerning Him; and He transmitted His headship and His 
office in the Holy Church to be visibly exercised and to be 
embodied before the eyes of men in the Pope of Rome. And, 
therefore, among the other privileges which He conferred 
upon His Vicar, He gave him that his brows should wear a 
crown. Therefore it is that, from the first day of the Church's 
history, her ruler, her Pope, her head rises before us, a 
sceptred man among men, and crowned with a glorious 
crown. Therefore it is that, encircling his honored brows, 
for ages, the world has beheld the triple crown, or tiara, — of 
which I am to speak to you this evening. Every other 
monarch among the nations wears for his crown a single 
circlet of gold. Ornament it as you will there is but one 
circle ; that would represent the meeting and the centering 
in the p*rson of the sovereign all the temporal interests and 
authority of the State. Upon the Pope's brows, however, 
rests a triple crown, called the tiara. It is made up of three 
distinct circL-s of gold. The first of these is symbolical of 
the universal episcopate of the Pope of Rome — that is to say, 
of his headship of all the faithful in the Church ; for, " there 
shall be but one fold and one shepherd," was Christ's word. 
The second of these circles that crowns the papal brows rep- 
resents the supremacy of jurisdiction, by which the Pope gov- 
erns not only all the faithful in the world at large, — feeding 
them as their supreme pastor, — but by which, also, he holds 
the supremacy of jurisdiction and of power over the anointed 
ministers, and the episcopacy itself, in the Church of God. 
The third and last circle of this crown represents the temporal 
influence, the temporal dominion which the Pope has exercised 
and enjoyed for more than a thousand years in this world. 

Behold then, what this tiara means. Upon those great 



254 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



festival days when all the Catholic world was accustomed to 
be represented by its highest, by its best and noblest, by its 
most intellectual representatives in Rome, the Holy Father 
was seen enthroned, surrounded by cardinals, patriarchs, 
archbishops, bishops, the priesthood, and the faithful. There 
he sat upon his high, and ancient, and time-honored throne; 
upon his head did he wear this triple crown, symbolizing his 
triple power. Now, my friends, in the Church of God every- 
thing is organized; everything arranged and disposed of in a 
wonderful harmony which expresses the mind and the wisdom 
of God, Himself. And, therefore, it is, that in every detail 
of the Catholic liturgy and worship, we find the very highest, 
and the very holiest gifts symbolized and signified to the man 
of faith. What do those three circles of the Pope's tiara 
symbolize ? They signify, first of all, the unity that God has 
6et upon His Church. Secondly, they signify the power and 
jurisdiction that God has conferred upon His Church. And 
thirdly, they signify all these benefits of a human kind, which 
the Church has conferred upon this world, and upon society. 

The first circlet of this tiara represents the unity of the 
Church. For, it tells the faithful, that although they may be 
diffused all the world over, although they may be counted by 
hundreds of millions, although they may be found in every 
clime, and speaking every language, although they may be 
broken up into various forms of government, thinking in 
varied forms of thought, having varied and distinguished 
interests in the things that should never perish, but abide with 
them for eternity ; that moment, out of all these varied ele- 
ments, out of these multiplied millions, out of these different 
nations arises one thought, one act of obedience, one aspira- 
tion of prayer, one uplifting of the whole man, body and soul 
in the unity of worship, which distinguishes the Catholic 
Church, the spouse of Christ (cheers). This was the first 
mark that Christ, the Son of God, set upon the brows of His 
Church. He set upon her the glorious seal of unity in doc- 
trine that all men throughout the world who belonged to her 
were to be as one individual man, in the one soul, and the one 
belief of their divine faith. He set upon her brows the unity 
of charity — that all men were to be one, in one heart and in 
one bond, which was to bind all Christian men to their fellow 
men, through the one heart of Christ. And in order to effect 
this unity the son of God put forth, the night before He suf- 
fered, the tender, but omnipotent prayer, in which he besought 
His Father, that the unity of the Church, should be visible to 
all men, and that it should be so perfect as to represent the 



TR-tL CATHOLIC MISSION. 255 

ineffable unity by which He was one with His Father, in that 
singleness of nature, which is the quintessence of the 
Almighty God. It was to be a visible unity. It was to be a 
unity that would force itself upon the notice of the world. It 
was to be a unity of thought and belief that would convince 
the world that the one mind, and the one word of the Lord 
of all truth, was in the heart, and in the intelligence, and 
upon the lips of His Church. It would be in vain, that Christ, 
the Son of God, prayed for that unity, if it was to be a hidden 
thing, not seen and known by men; if it was to be a contra- 
dictory thing, involving an outrage upon all logic and all rea- 
son ; as, for instance, the Protestant idea of unity, which is, 
"Let us agree to differ." "Let us agree to differ ! " Why, 
what does this mean ? It means something like what the 
Irishman meant, when he met his friend, and said, " Oh, my 
dear fellow, I am so happy and glad to meet you ! And I 
want to give you a proof of it." And he knocked him down ! 
(Laughter.) But you remember this was the sign of love 
(renewed laughter). And so, the Protestant logic of this 
world says ; — " Let us agree to differ." That is to say ; — 
let us create unity by making disunion ! 

Now, as the divine, eternal, incarnate wisdom determined 
that that crown and countersign of unity should be visible 
upon His Church, it was absolutely necessary for Him 
to constitute one man — one individual man — as the visible 
sign and guarantee of that unity in the Church, for ever. It 
would not have answered to have left the twelve apostles, 
equal in power, equal in jurisdiction. For, all holy as they 
were, all inspired as they were, if equal power and 
jurisdiction had been left to all, if no one man among 
them had been brought forth and made the head of 
all, with all their perfection, with all their inspiration, 
with all their love for Christ, they would not, being 
twelve, have represented the sacred principle of unity in the 
Church. Therefore, did Christ, the Son of God, from among 
the twelve take one ; called that man forth, He laid His 
hands upon him ; and said, " Hear him ! hear his words ! " 
That, He did not say of any of the others, but took care 
that all the others should be present to witness these words 
and to acknowledge their chief. He took that man in the 
presence of the Twelve, and He said to him — to them : 
"Hitherto you have been called Simon; now I say your 
name is Cephas, which means a rock ; and upon this" rock I 
will build my Church." Again, in the plainest of language, 
He Slid to that man: "Thou — thou! rock! confirm thy 



25-6 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



brethren !" In the presence of all, He demanded of that 
man the triple, thrice-repeated acknowledgment and con- 
fession of his love. " Peter," He said to him, "you know 
how dearly John, my virgin friend, loves me. Do you love 
me more ? You know how well all these around me lovo 
me. Do you love me more than all ? " And until Peter 
three times asserted that he loved His Master with a love 
surpassing that of all others, Christ delayed His divine 
commission. But, when the triple acknowledgment was 
made, He said to Peter: "Feed thou my lambs ; feed thou 
my sheep ! " " There shall be one fold," said the Son of 
God, " and one shepherd." That was the visible unity of 
the Church; that was to be the countersign of the divine 
origin of the Church of God, and that was to be represented 
unto all ages by the one Head and Supreme Pastor of all, the 
Pope of Pome (cheers). 

Mark the splendid harmony that is here. The Adorable 
Son of God is one with the Father by the ineffable union of 
nature from all eternity. The Son of God made man, still is 
man, and only man, in the hypostatical union in which the 
two natures met in one divine person. The Church that 
sprung from Christ, — the Lord God and man, united, — is to 
be one until the end of time. And, therefore, the principle 
of unity passes, as it were, from Christ to Peter, and from 
Peter to each succeeding Pontiff ; so that the Church of God 
is recognized by its union with its Head, and by that, the 
One Head, which governs all. Therefore did St. Ambrose 
sav : " Show me Peter ; for, where Peter is, there is the Church 
of God." 

Xow, you see at once the significance of that first circle 
of gold that twines round the papal crown. It speaks of the 
Hope as the supreme pastor of all the faithful. It speaks of 
him as the one voice, and the only one, able to fill the world, 
and before whose utterances the whole Christian and Catholic 
world bows down as one man (cheers). It speaks of the 
Pope as the one shepherd of the one fold ; and it tells us that 
as we are bound to hear his voice, and as that voice can 
never resound through the whole Church, which cannot by 
possibility, proclaim a lie — that when the Pope of Rome 
speaks to the faithful as supreme pastor, pronouncing upon 
and witnessing the faith of the Catholic Church, — that the 
self-same spirit that preserves that Church from falling into 
error, preserves her Pastor, so that he can never propound to 
her anything erroneous or unholy, or at variance with the 
Bacred morality of the Christian law (cheers). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION- 



251 



The second circle of gold represents the second great attri- 
bute that Christ, our Lord, emphatically laid upon His Church. 
As clearly as He proved that that Church should be one, so 
clearly did he pray and prophecy that that Church was to 
have power and jurisdiction. "All power," He said to His 
Apostles, "all power in Heaven and upon earth is given unto 
Me." Behold the Head of the Church speaking to His Church, 
"Given unto me !" "I am the centre of that power." "As 
the Father sent me, thus imbued with power, so do I send 
you." And then he set upon the brows of his Apostles, and, 
throigh them, on the Church, the crown of spiritual power. 
But, as all power is derived from God it follows that, in the 
Church of God, whoever represents, as viceroy and vicar, su- 
preme Pastor and ruler of the Church, — whoever represents 
Christ, who is the source of all power, that man has supreme 
jurisdiction in the Church of God, not only over the Faith- 
ful, but over the pastors of the flock and the Episcopacy. 
James, and John, and Andrew, and Phillip, and the others, 
were all bishops. St. Ignatius of Antioch, and all the suc- 
ceeding great names that adorn the episcopal roll in the 
Church — all had power ; all exercised power ; and all were 
recognized as the Church recognizes them and their success- 
ors still, as her archbishops and bishops ; and all had that 
power by divine institution, and that their episcopacy in the 
Church is of divine origin ; and yet, that power is so subju- 
gated and subordinated that the Pope, as the supreme bishop 
of bishops, to whom Christ said, " Feed not only the lambs," 
my faithful; but "feed my sheep," the matured ones and 
holy ones in the sanctuary of the Church (loud cheers). 

Finally, the third circle of gold twining around that 
time-honored crown of the tiara, represents the temporal 
power that the Pojoe has wielded for so many centuries, and 
which has been the cause of so many blessings, and so much 
liberty and civilization to the world. It was not in the direct 
mission of the Church of God to civilize mankind, but only 
to sanctify them. But, inasmuch as no man can be sancti- 
fied without being instructed, without the elements of civil- 
ization being applied to him, therefore, indirectly, but most 
powerfully, did Christ, our Lord, confer upon His Church 
that she should be the great former and creator of society ; 
that she should be the mother of the highest civilization of 
this world ; that she should be the giver of the choicest and 
the highest of human gifts ; and, therefore, that she should 
have that power, that jurisdiction, that position, in her head, 
among the rulers of the nations, that would give her a strong 



258 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



voice and a powerful action in the guidance of human society 
(cheers). And as to the second circle of this golden crown — 
viz., the universal pastorate of the Church — and the suprem- 
acy, even in the sanctuary, — both of these did Peter receive 
from Christ ; and these two have been twined round the 
Papal brow by the very hand of the Son of God, Himself ! 
The third circle of temporal power, the Pope received at the 
hands of the world ; at the hands of human society ; at the 
hands of the people. And he received it out of the necessi- 
ties of the people, that he might be their king, their ruler, and 
their father upon this earth. Now, such being the tiara, we 
come to consider it in the past, as history tells us of it ; in its 
present, as we behold it to-day ; and in its future. 

How old is this tiara ? I answer that although the mere 
material crown and its form dates only from about the year 
1340, or '42, and the Pontificate of Benedict the Twelfth, 
the tiara itself — the reality of it — the thing that it signifies — 
is as ancient as the Church of God, which was founded by 
Christ, our Lord. In the past, from the day that the Son of 
God ascended into Heaven, all history attests to us that 
Peter, and Peter's successors, were acknowledged to be the 
Bupreme pastors of the Church of God. Never, when Peter 
spoke, never did the Church refuse to accept his word, and 
to bow down before his final decision. In the very first 
Council of Jerusalem, grave questions that were brought 
before the Assembly were argued upon by various of the 
Apostles, until Peter rose, and the moment that Peter spoke 
and said : " Let this be done so ; let such things be omitted; 
such things be enforced" — that moment every man in the 
Assembly held his peace, and took the decision of Peter as 
the very echo of the Invisible Head of the Church, who spoke 
in him, by and through him [loud cheers]. In all the suc- 
ceeding ages, the nations bowed down as they received the 
words of the Gospel. The nations bowed down and accepted 
that message on the author? A y and on the testimony of the 
Pope of Rome ! Where, among the nations, who have 
embraced the Cross, — where, among the nations who have 
upheld the Cross, — where is there one that did not receive 
its mission and its Gospel message, on the message and on the 
testimony of the Pope of Rome ? 

From the very first ages, while they yet lay hid in the 
catacombs, we read of saintly missionaries going forth from 
under the Pope's hands to spread the message of Divine 
Truth throughout the lands. Scarcely had the Church 
emerged from the catacombs, and burst into the glory and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



259 



splendor of her renewed existence than we find one of the 
early Popes of Rome laying his hand upon the head of a holy 
youth that knelt before him, consecrating that youth into the 
priesthood, into the episcopacy — and sending him straight 
from Rome to a mission, the grandest and the most fruitful— 
the most, glorious of any in the Church. That Pope was 
Celeatine, of Rome; and the man whom he sent was Patrick, 
who, by the Pope's order, wended his way to Ireland (cheers). 
From the Pope of Rome did he (Patrick) receive his mission 
and his message. From the Pope of Rome did he receive his 
authority and his jurisdiction. The diploma that he brought 
to Ireland was attached to the Gospel itself. It was the tes- 
timony of the Church of Christ, countersigned by Celestine, 
who derived his authority from Peter, who derived his from 
Christ. And when, in his old age, he had evangelized the 
whole island; when he had brought Ireland into the full light 
of the Christian faith, and into the full blaze of her Christian 
sanctity, the aged apostle, now drooping into years, called 
the bishops and the priests of Ireland around him; and, 
among his last words to them were these : "If ever a difficulty 
arises among you; — If ever a doubt of any passage of the 
Scripture, or of any doctrine of the Church's law — or of any- 
thing touching the Church of God or the salvation of the 
souls of your people, — if ever any doubt arises among you, 
go to Rome — to the mother of the nations — and Peter will 
instruct you thereon ! " (cheers.) Well and faithfully did the 
mind and the heart of Ireland take in the words of its saintly 
apostle. Never — through good report or evil report — never 
has Ireland swerved for one instant — never has she turned to 
look with a favoring or a reverential eye upon this authority, 
or upon that; but straight to Peter. Never has she, for an 
instant, lost her instinct, so as to mistake for Peter any 
pretender, or any other Pope ! Never, for an instant, has 
she allowed her heart or her hand to be snared from Peter ! It 
is a long story. It is a story of fourteen hundred years. But 
Ireland has preserved her faith through her devotion to 
Peter, and to the Pope of Rome, Peter's successor; and she 
has seen every nation during these fourteen hundred years — 
every nation that ever separated from Peter — she has seen 
them> one and all, languish and die, until the sap of divine 
knowledge, — until the sap of divine grace — was dried up in 
them; and they utterly perished, because they were separated 
from the Rock of Ages, the Pope of Rome (enthusiastic 
cheering). 

Just as the people, in all ages and in all times, bowed 



260 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION*. 



down before their supreme pastor, so also has the Episcopate 
in the Church of God, at all times, recognized the supremacy 
of the Pope of Rome, and at all' times bowed before the 
second crown that encircles his glorious tiara. Never did 
the Episcopacy of the Catholic Church meet in council ex- 
cept upon the invocation of the Pope of Pome. Never did 
they promulgate a decree until they first sent it to the Pope 
of Rome to ask him if it was according to the truth, and to 
get the seal and the countersign of his name upon it, that it 
might have the authority of the Church of God before their 
people. From time to time, in the history of the Episcopate, 
there have been rebellious men that rose up against the author- 
ity, and disputed the power of the Church of Rome. But, 
just as the nations that separated from Peter, separated 
themselves thereby from the unity of the truth, and of sanct- 
ity and of Christian doctrine, and of Christian morality, so, 
in like manner, the Bishop who, at any time, in any place, or 
in any age, disputed Peter's power, Peter's authority, and 
separated from him, was cut off from Peter and from the 
Church ; the mitre fell, dishonored, from his head ; and he 
became a useless member, lopped off from the Church of God, 
without power, without jurisdiction, without the veneration, 
or the respect, or the love of his people. Thus has it ever 
been in times gone by. The Pope of Rome commands the 
Church through the Episcopate. The Pope of Rome speaks 
and testifies to the Church's doctrine through the Episcopate. 
Whenever any grave, important question, touching doctrine, 
has to be decided, the Pope of Rome has always called the 
Episcopate about him; — not that he could not decide, but 
that he might surround his decision with all that careful and 
prudent examination, with all that weight of universal autho- 
rity over the world which would bring that decision, when he 
pronounced it, more clearly and more directly home to every 
Catholic mind. And faithful has that Episcopate been, — 
since the day that eleven Bishops met Peter, the Pope, in 
Jerusalem, in the first Council, — down to the day when, three 
years ago, eight hundred Catholic Archbishops and Bishops 
met Peter's successor in the halls of the Vatican and bowed 
down before the word of truth upon his lips [cheers]. 

Such in the past, as history attests — such were the two 
circles of the supreme pastorate and supreme jurisdiction in 
the Church. 

The Roman empire, as you all know, was utterly de- 
stroyed by the incursions of the barbarians, in the fifth 
century. A king, at the head of his ferocious army, marched 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



261 



on Home. The Pope was applied to by the terrified citizens; 
and Leo the Great went forth to meet Attila, "the Scourge 
of God." He found him in the midst of his rude barbarian 
warriors, on the banks of the Mincio. He found him exult- 
ing in the strength and power of his irresistible army. He 
found him surging and sweeping on towards Rome, with the 
apparent force of inevitable destiny, and with his outspread 
wings of destruction. He found him, in the pride and in 
the supreme passion of his lustful and barbaric heart, sworn 
to destroy the city that was the " Mother of Nations." And, 
as he was in the very sweep of his conquest and pride, 
— unfriended and almost alone, having nothing but 
the majesty of his position and of his glorious virtue 
around him, the Pope said : — " Hold ! Rome is sacred, and 
your feet shall never tread upon its ancient pavement! Hold! 
Let Rome be spared ! " And, while he was speaking, Attila 
looked upon the face of the man, and presently he saw over 
the head of St. Leo, the Pope, two angry figures, the Apos- 
tles St. Peter and St. Paul, with fire and the anger of God 
beaming from their eyes, and with drawn swords menacing 
kirn. And, even as the angel stood in the prophet's path of 
old, and barred his progress, so did Peter and Paul appear 
in mid-air and bar the barbarian. " Let us return," said he, 
" and let us not approach this terrible and God-defended 
city of Rome ! " Attila fled to his northern forests, and Leo 
returned, having saved the existence and the blood of ancient 
and imperial Rome ! (Cheers.) But army followed army ; 
until, at length, Alaric conquered and sacked the city, burned 
and destroyed it, broke up all its splendor and all its glory, 
overran and destroyed all the surrounding provinces ; and, 
so the destruction that he began was completed a few years 
later by the King Odoacer, who wiped away the last ves- 
tige of the ancient Roman empire ! 

Then, my friends, all Italy was a prey to and was torn 
with factions ; covered with the blood of the people. There 
was no one to save them. In vain did they appeal to the dis- 
tant Eastern Emperor, at Constantinople. He laughed at 
their misery, and abandoned them in the hour of their deep- 
est affliction and sorrow ; while wave after wave of barbaric 
invasion swept over the fair land, until life became a burden 
too intolerable to bear, and the people cried out, from their 
breaking hearts, for the Pope of Rome to take thein under 
his protection, to let them declare him King, and so obtain 
his safeguard and his protection for their lives and their 
property. For many long years the Pope resisted the pro- 



262 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ferred crown. It grew upon his brows insensibly. It canwj 
to him in spite of himself. We know that, year after year, 
each successive Pope was employed sending letters, sending 
messengers to supplicate, to implore the Christian emperor to 
send an army for the protection of Italy ; and when he did 
send his army they were worse, in their heretical lawlessness, 
more tyrannical, more blood-thirsty over the unfortunate peo- 
ple of Italy, than even the savage hordes that came down 
from the north of Europe. And so it came to pass that, in 
the dire distress of the people the Pope was obliged to accept 
tLe temporal power of Rome, and of some of the adjoining 
provinces. History tells us that he might, in that day, have 
obtained, if he wished it, the sovereignty over all Italy. 
They would have been only too happy to accept him as their 
King ; but no lust of power, no ambition of empire guided 
him ; and the great St. Gregory tells us that he was op- 
pressed with the cares of the temporal dominion, and that 
it was forced upon him against his will. 

However, now the crown is upon his head. ~Now he is 
acknowledged a monarch — a reigning king among monarchs. 
And now let us see what was the purpose of God in thus 
establishing that temporal power in so early a portion of the 
history of the world's civilization. At that time there was no 
law in Europe. The nations had not yet settled down or 
formed. Every man did as he would. The kings were only 
half-civilized barbarous men recently converted to Christianity, 
wielding enormous power, and only too anxious to make that 
power the instrument for gratifying every most terrible pas- 
sion of lust, of pride, of ambition, and of revenge. Chief- 
tains, taking to themselves the titles of Baron, Duke, Mar- 
grave, and so on gathered around them troops, bands of mer- 
cenaries, and preyed on the poor people, until they covered 
the whole Continent with confusion and with blood. There 
was no power to restrain them. There was no power to make 
them spare their people. There was no voice to assert the 
cause of the poor and the oppressed, save one ; and that was 
the voice of the monarch who was crowned in Rome, the an- 
cient and powerful head of the Catholic Church [cheers]. 
Whence came his influence or his power over them ? Ah, it 
came from this : with all their crimes, they still had received 
from God the gift of faith, and they knew — the very worst 
among them knew — as history tells us, that when the Pope 
spoke it was the echo of the voice of God. They acknowl- 
edged i; as a supreme power over their consciences, over their 
actions — as a power that could be wielded not only for their 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 263 

salvation, but even for their destruction by the terrible sentence 
of excommunication, by which the Pope cut them off from the 
Church. The faith in the hearts of these rude kings was 
also disseminated among their people ; and so strong was it, 
that the moment the Pope denounced or excommunicated any 
monarch, that moment, no matter how great he was as a. 
warrior, as a statesman, as a writer — that moment the people 
shrank from him as they would from the pest-stricken leper, 
and his voice was no longer heard as an authority either in 
the battle-field or in the council chamber. Knowing this, the 
kings were afraid of the Pope. Knowing this, the people 
looked up to the Pope : and if any king overtaxed his people 
and ground them to the earth, or if any king violated the law 
of eternal justice by shedding the blood of any man without 
just cause, or if any king declared an unjust and unnecessary 
war, or if any king repudiated his lawful wife, and in the 
strength and power of his passion sought to scandalize his 
subjects, and to openly insult and outrage the law of God, — 
the people, the soldiery, society, the abandoned and injured 
woman, all alike, looked up to and appealed to the Pope of 
Rome as the only power that could sway the world, and 
strike terror into the heart of the greatest, the most 
powerful, and the most lawless king upon the earth. 
[Cheers.] 

History — from every source from which we can draw it — 
tells us what manner of men were the kings and dukes and rulers 
the Pope had to deal with. What manner of men were they ? 
In the eleventh century the Emperor Otho invited all his 
nobility to a grand banquet, and while they were in the 
midst of their festivity, in came one of the king's officers with 
a long list of names of men who were there present; and every 
man whose name was called out had to rise from the banquet, 
and walk into a room adjoining, and there submit to an 
unjust, a cruel, and an instantaneous death. These were the 
kind of men the Pope had to deal with. Another man that 
we read of was Lothair. His lustful eye fell upon a beautiful 
woman; and he instantly puts away and repudiates his vir- 
tuous and honored wife, and he takes to himself this concubine, 
in the face of the world, proclaiming, or suggesting that he 
could proclaim, that, because he was an emperor, or a king, 
he was at liberty to violate the law of God, outrage the pro- 
prieties of society, scandalize his subjects, and take liberties 
with their honor and with their integrity, which would not 
be permitted to any other man. How did the Pope in these 
instances deal with such men ? How did he use the temporal 



264 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION, 



power, so great and so tremendous, with which God and 
society had invested him ? He made the murderers do public 
penance, and make restitution to the families of those whose 
blood they had shed. He called to him that emperor, 
Lothair; he brought him before him; he made him, in a pub* 
lie church, and before all the people, repudiate that woman 
whom he had taken to his adulterous embrace ; take back his 
lawful empress and queen, pledge to her again, by solemn oath, 
before all the people, that he never would love another, and 
that he would be faithful to her as a husband and a man, 
until the hour of his death (loud cheers). Lothair broke his 
oath — his oath taken at that solemn moment, when the Pope, 
with the ciborium in his hand, held up the body of the Lord, 
and said, " Until you swear fidelity to your lawful wife, I will 
not place the Holy Communion upon your lips." He took 
that oath; he broke it; and that day month — one month 
after he had received that Communion — he was a dead man; 
and the whole world — the whole Christian world, — recognized 
in that death the vengeance of God falling upon a perjured 
and an excommunicated sinner (cheers). How did the Pope 
vindicate by his temporal power and authority the influence 
that it gave him among the kings and the nations ? How 
did he operate upon society ? When King Philip, of France, 
wished to repudiate his lawful wife, and take another in her 
stead, the Pope excommunicated him, and obliged him, in the 
face of the world, to take back, and to honor with his love 
and with his fidelity the woman whom he had sworn before 
the altar to worship and to protect as long as she lived. 

How did the Pope exercise his temporal power when 
Spain and Portugal, both in the zenith of their power, were 
about to draw the sword, and to deluge those fair lands with 
the blood of the people ? The Pope stepped in and said, " No 
war ! — there is no necessity for war ; — there is no justification 
for war ; and if you shed the blood of your people," he said 
to both kings, " I will cut you both off*, and fling you, excom- 
municated, out of the Church" (cheers). Thus did he pre- 
serve the rights — the sacred rights of marriage ; thus did he 
preserve the honor, the integrity, the position of the Chris- 
tian woman — the Christian mother who is the source, the 
fountain-head of all this world's society, and the one centre of 
all our hopes [cheers]. Thus did he save the people, curb the 
angry passions of their sovereigns ; thus did he tell the king, 
" So long as you rule j ustly, so long as you respect the rights 
of the humblest of your subjects, I w r ill uphold you ; I will 
set a crown upon your head, and I will fling around you all 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



265 



the authority, and all the jurisdiction, and sacredness of your 
monarchy. I will preach to your people obedience, loyalty, 
bravery and love ; but, if you trample upon that people's 
rights, if you abuse your power to scandalize them, to injure 
them in their integrity, in their conscience, — I will be the 
first to take the crown from your head, and to declare to the 
world that you are unworthy to wear it" (loud cheers). 
Modern historians say, " O, we admit all this : but what right 
had the Pope to do it ? What right had he to do it ? " What 
right ? The best of right. Who on this earth had a right 
to do it, if not the man who represented Christ, the Origina- 
tor and the Saviour of the world (cheers). What right had 
he to do it? He had the right that even society itself, and 
the people, gave him ; for they cried out to him, "Save us 
from our kings; save us from injustice; save us from dis- 
honor, and we will be loyal and true as long as our leaders 
and our monarchs are worthy of our loyalty and our truth" 
(loud cheers). 

Such, in the past history of the world, was the third circle, 
that twines round the Papal Crown. Now, passing from the 
past to the tiara of to-day, what do we find ? We find a man 
in Rome, the most extraordinary, in some things, of all those 
that ever succeeded to the supremacy of the Church, and in 
the office of St. Peter ; — most extraordinary, particularly in 
his misfortunes ; — most extraordinary in the length of his 
reign, for he is the only Pope that has outlived " the years 
of Peter ; " — most extraordinary in the ingratitude of the 
world towards him, and the patience with which he has borne 
it ; — most extraordinary in the heroic firmness of his charac- 
ter, and in the singleness of his devotion to his God and to 
the spouse of God, the Church (great cheering) ; — Pius IX. 
(renewed cheering), the glorious Pontiff", the man whom the 
bitterest enemies of the Church, whom the most foul-mcathed 
infidels of the day are obliged to acknowledge as a faithful 
and true servant of the Lord, his God, a faithful ruler oi the 
Church, and a man from whose aged countenance there beams 
forth upon all who see him, the sweetness and the purity of 
Christ (great cheering). I have seen him in the halls of the 
Vatican ; I have seen the most prejudiced Protestant ladies 
and gentlemen walk into that audience chamber, I have seen 
them come forth, their eyes streaming with tears ; I have 
Seen them come forth entranced with admiration at the vis- 
ion of sanctity and venerableness that they have beheld in the 
head of the Catholic Church (cheers). He is extraordinary 
in that he has outlived the years of Peter. Well do I remem 
12 



266 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ber him, as he stood upon the altar five and twenty years 
ago, fair and beautiful in his youthful manhood. Well do I 
remember the heroic voice that pealed like a clarion over the 
mighty square of St. Peter's, and seemed as if it was an 
angel of God that was come down from heaven, and in a 
voice of melodious thunder, was flinging a pentecost of grace 
and blessing over the people (great cheering). Five and 
twenty years have passed away, and more. Never during the 
long roil of PontifFs — never did man sit upon St. Peter's 
chair so long ; so that it even passed into a proverb, that no 
Pope was ever to see the years of Peter. That proverb is 
falsified in Pins. He has passed the mystic Rubicon of the 
Papal age. He has passed the bounds which closed around all 
his predecessors. He has passed the years of Peter upon the 
Papal throne. Oh ! may he live, if it be God's will, to guide 
the Church, until he has doubled the years of Peter (great 
cheering). He is singular in what the world calls his misfor- 
tunes ; but what, to me, or any man of faith, must absolutely 
appear as a startling resemblance to the last week that the 
Lord, our Saviour, spent before His passion in Jerusalem. 

I remember Pius IX., surrounded by the acclamations 
and the admiration of the whole world. No word of praise 
was too great to be bestowed upon him. He was the theme 
of every popular writer. He was the idol of the people. 
The moment they beheld him the cry came forth : — " Viva y 
viva, il salvatore de lapatria!" Long live the saviour of 
his people, and of his country ! To-day he must not show 
his face in the very streets of Rome ; and in the very halls 
of the deserted Vatican he hears the echoes of the shouts of 
those that cry, " Blessed be the hand that shall be embrued 
in thy blood, O Pius" (sensation) ! Now, I ask any man on 
the face of the earth, what has this man done ? What can 
the greatest enemy of the Pope lay his hand upon, and say 
he has done so and so, and he has deserved this change of 
popular friendship, and of popular opinion ? The greatest 
enemy that the Pope has on this earth is not able to bring a 
single charge against him, during these twenty-five years, to 
account for that change of opinion. What has changed 
blessings into curses? What has changed homage and vener- 
ation into contempt and obloquy? There is no accounting for 
it. It is like the change that came over the people of Jer- 
usalem, who, on Palm Sunday, cried " Hosanna to the Son 
of David," and on Good Friday morning cried, " Give Him 
to us! We will tear Him to pieces and crucify Him?" 
There is no accounting for it. Has he oppressed the Roman 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



207 



people ? No. I lived many years in Rome, under his Pontifi- 
cate. There was no taxation worth speaking of ; there was 
no want, no misery. There was plenty of education for the 
children, plenty of employment, plenty of diversion. There 
was no forcible conscription of the youth, to send them into 
some vile cess-pool of corruption, in the shape of a barrack, 
or to hunt them out to the battle-field, to be mown down 
and flung into blood-stained graves. No ; every man 
possessed his house and his soul in peace. There was pros- 
perity in the land. And over all this there was the hand 
ever waving a blessing, and a voice invoking benediction 
and grace for his people. Whence came the change ? No 
man can tell. Therefore, I say, this man is extraordinary in 
his misfortunes, inasmuch as they bring out, in the most 
striking and terrible manner, his resemblance to his crucified 
Lord and Saviour, the Head of the Church (cheers). He is 
singular in the magnificence of his character. The student 
of history may read the lives of all the Popes that have 
come down from Peter to Pius, and I make this assertion, 
that there is not a single feature of grandeur or magnificence 
in the character of any one of these Popes, that does not 
shine out, concentrated, in the character of Pius IX. [cheers]. 

We admire the missionary zeal of St. Gregory the Great, 
of St. Celestine. Pius the Ninth has sent from under his 
own hand, and from under his own blessing, men who have 
honored his Pontificate, as well as the Church, their mother, 
by shedding their blood in martyrdom, for the faith (loud 
cheers). From under his hand have gone forth those holy 
ones who have languished in the dungeons of China and of 
Japan. From under his hands have gone forth those heroic 
Jesuit sons of St. Ignatius, that have lifted the standard of the 
Cross, and uplifted the name — the name which forms their 
crown and their glory, even in the eyes of men, unto the 
farthest nations of the earth (cheers). If we admire the love 
of Rome that shines forth in the character of St. Leo the 
Great, who was the Pope among them all that ever loved 
Rome and the Romans so tenderly as the heart of Pius IX 
loved them (cheers) ? When he came to the throne there 
were Romans in exile, and there were Romans in prison. 
The very first act of the Pontiff was to fling open the prison 
doors, and to say to these children of misfortune, " Come forth, 
Italians; breathe the pure air and feast your eyes upon tbe 
loveliness of your native land" (cheers). There were Romans 
who were in exile: he sent them the message of manumition, 
and of pardon, and of love, in whatever land they were, and 



208 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



said, " Come back to me ; — come back and sit down in peace 
and in contentment under my empire ; for O Rome, and chil- 
dren of Rome, I love you." This was the language and these 
were the emphatic accents of the glorious Pius IX. Where 
was the Pope who ever embellished Rome as he did ? I lived 
in Rome during the first year of his Pontificate : I lived there 
in the last. I might almost say that he found it a city of brick, 
and that he handed it over to Victor Emanuel, the robber, a 
city of polished and shining marble (loud cheers). Orphan- 
ages, hospitals, public schools, model lodging houses, public 
baths and lavatories, splendid fountains : everything that the 
Roman citizen could require, either for his wants or for his 
luxury, or, if you will, his pleasure, the magnificent hand of 
Pius iX provided ; for, for the last five-and-twenty years, that 
hand has never ceased in beautifying and embellishing his 
loved and imperial Rome. 

We admire the glorious firmness, the magnificent rock-like 
endurance of St. Gregory VII. , whom history knows by the 
name of Hildebrand ; how he stood in the path of the impious 
German Emperors. Like a rock against which the tide dashes, 
but dashes in vain — so did he stand to stem the torrent of 
their tyranny and of their corruption. We admire Gregory 
VII., when saying Mass before the Emperor, he took the blessed 
Eucharist into his hands, and turned round with the Holy Com- 
munion and said, " Oh ! majesty, I am about to give you the 
Holy Body of Jesus Christ. I swear before my God," said the 
Pope, " in whose presence I now stand, that I have never acted 
save for the Church which He loves, and for the happiness 
of His people. ISTow, O King, swear thou the same ; and I 
will put God upon thy lips ! " The Emperor hung his head 
and said, " I cannot swear it, for it would not be true," and 
the Holy Communion was denied him (cheers). We admire 
that magnificent memory in the Church of God which upheld 
the rights of Peter and of the Church against king and 
kaiser ; but, T ask you, does not the image of the sainted 
Gregory VII. rise before our eyes from out the recesses of 
history, and come forth into the full blaze of the present gen- 
eration in the magnificent constancy and firmness of Pius IX., 
the Pope of Rome (cheers) ? It was a question of only giv- 
ing up a little child that was baptized into the Christian 
Church, and engrafted, by Baptism, upon Christ, our Lord, — 
a little child that was engrafted into the Son of God and His 
Church, — had received the rites, and claimed, in justice, to 
come to know and love that God on whom he had been engraf- 
ted by Baptism. All the powers of the world, — all the dukes 



TIIE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



269 



and kings and governments in Europe, — came around the 
Pope and said, " You must give up that child ; he must be 
taught to blaspheme and to hate that Lord upon whom he has 
been engrafted by Baptism. He must not belong to Christ, 
or the Church, even though he is baptized into it," And they 
asked the Pope, by the surrender of that child, to proclaim 
the surrender of that portion of the Church's faith that tells 
us, on the authority of the inspired Apostle, that by Baptism, 
like a wild olive branch let into a good tree, we are let into 
Jesus Christ. They sent their fleets to Civita Vecchia ; they 
pointed their cannon against the Vatican ; and told the Pope 
that his existence and his life depended upon his giving up 
that child. And he declared, in the face of the world and 
pronounced that word which will shine in characters of glory 
on his brow in Heaven, — he pronounced the immortal non 
possumuSy — " I will not do it, because I cannot do it" [cheers] ! 
If he wants an epitaph, the most glorious language that need 
be written on his tomb would be: " Here lies the man whom 
the whole world tried to coerce to commit a sin ; and who 
answered the whole world ' non posswnusj — I cannot doit" 
[renewed cheers]. This is the man that to-day wears, and so 
gloriously wears, the time-honored tiara that has come down 
to him through eighteen hundred years of suffering and of 
glory, of joy, and of sorrow. 

The third circlet, — that of the temporal power, — for a time 
is gone. There is a robber, who calls himself a King, seated 
now in the Quirinal, in Rome. He had not the decency to 
tell the Pope that he was coming to plunder him. He had 
not the decency, when he did come to Rome, to build a house 
for himself; but he must take one of the old man's houses 
[sensation]. It was a question of bringing his women into 
these, the Pope's own chambers, which were always like sanc- 
tuaries, where ladies generally are not permitted to come in. 
There was a kind of tradition of holiness about them and ex- 
clusiveness, in this way ; and he brings his Queen and his 
" ladies all" to these chambers, where, if they had a particle of 
womanly decency, and delicacy, and propriety, they Avould 
not enter. I do not believe there is a lady here listening to 
me, who would walk into the Quirinal, to-morrow, even if she 
was in Rome [cheers]. The third circlet, for a time, is pluck- 
ed from the Pope's brows ; and, instead of a crown of gold, 
the aged man has bent down and has received from the hands 
of ungrateful Italy the present of a crown of thorns. But, as 
if to compensate him for the temporary absence of the crown 
of temporal rule ; as if to make up to him for that which has 



270 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



been plucked, for a time only, from the tiara, the Almighty 
God has brought out, in our age, upon the pontificate of Pius 
IX., the other two circlets, that of supreme Pastorate and 
supreme Bishop of the Church, with an additional lustre and 
glory that they never had before (cheers). Never, in the his- 
tory of the Catholic Church, have the faithful, all the world 
over, listened with so much reverence, with so much love, 
with so much faith and joy, as the Catholics of the world, to 
day, listen to the voice of Pius IX. in Rome (cheers). Never 
h^.ve the Bishops of the Catholic Church shown such unani- 
mity, such unity of thought, such profound and magnificent 
obedience. Never has the Episcopate of the Catholic Church 
so loudly, emphatically, and unitedly upheld the privileges and 
the glories of its head, as the Episcopacy of this day has up- 
held the glory of the Papacy of Pius IX. (loud cheers). And 
it is no small subject of praise and of thankfulness to us, that, 
when eight hundred men among them, loaded with the res- 
ponsibility of the Church, — eight hundred men representing 
all that the Church had, of perfection, of the priesthood, and 
of jurisdiction and power, — when these eight hundred men 
were gathered round the throne of the august Pontiff, they 
presented to the world in its hostility, in its infidelity, in its 
hatred, so firm a front, that they were all of one mind, of one 
soul ; one voice only was heard from the lips of these eight 
hundred; and that voice said " Tues PetrusP 1 Oh! Pius, 
Peter speaks in thee ; and Christ, the Lord, speaks in Peter 
[cheers]. One of the most honored of these eight hundred, — 
one of the foremost in dignity and in worth, — now sits here in 
the midst of you, the Bishop and pastor of your souls. [This 
allusion to Archbishop McCloskey elicited a perfect storm of 
cheering, in acknowledgment of which the Archbishop rose and 
bowed]. He can bear living witness to the fact which I have 
stated. Out of the resources of his learned mind,— out of his 
Roman experience, as an Archbishop,— will he tell you, — out of 
historic lore will he tell you,— that never was the Church of 
God more united, both in the priesthood and episcopacy, and 
in the people, — more united in ranks cemented by faith and 
strengthened by love, than the Christian and Catholic world 
to-day is, around the glorious throne of the uncrowned Pon- 
tiff, Pius IX. [great cheering]. 

And what shall be the future of this tiara ? We know 
that the crown of universal pastorship and the crown of 
supremacy are his; that no man can take from him that which 
has grown unto him under the hand of Jesus Christ. We 
know that he may be in exile to-morrow, that he may be 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



271 



"without a home, persecuted and Imnted from one city to 
another. But we know that God and the Church of God 
have set their seal upon him, and their sign that no other 
man upon this earth can wear, namely, that he is the head of 
the Church, and the infallible guide of the infallible flock of 
Christ (loud cheers). Will his temporal power be restored ? 
"Will the third circle ever again shine upon that tiara ? It 
is a singular fact that the only man who can speak of the 
future with certainty is the Catholic. Every other man when 
he comes to discuss any subject of the future must say, 
"Well, in all probability, perhaps, it may come to pass; 
it may be so and so" (laughter) ; but the Catholic man, when 
he comes to speak of the future, says, " Such and such things 
are to come ; " he knows it as sure as fate. There is not a man 
among us that does not know that this usurpation of Rome is 
only a question of a few days (cheers) — only a question of a 
few days (renewed cheers) ; — that the knavish king may 
remain this year, next year ; perhaps a few years more ; but 
as sure as Rome is seated upon her seven hills, so surely 
will the third circle of the tiara be there ; so surely must 
there be a Pope-king there [great cheering and cries of 
" Bravo. "] And why ? For the simplest of all reasons : that 
her empire, or her temporal power is very convenient, and 
very useful, and very necessary for the Church of God ; and 
that whatever is convenient, or useful or necessary for her, 
God in Heaven will provide for her [cheers]. That temporal 
power will return as it returned in the times of old, because 
it is good for the Church, and because the world cannot get 
on without it [cheers]. The hand that has held the reins of 
society for a thousand years and more, — the hand that has 
held the curb tight upon the passions, and the ambition, and 
the injustice of Kings, — the hand that has held with a firm 
grasp, the reins that govern the people, is as necessary in the 
time to come, as it was in the times past: and, therefore, 
God will keep that hand that holds the reins of the world, a 
royal hand [cheers]. Hence it is that we Catholics have not 
the slightest apprehension, the slightest fear, about this. 

We know that, even as our Divine Lord and Master suf- 
fered in Jerusalem, and was buried and remained for three 
days in the grave, and undeniably rose again, all the more 
glorious because of His previous suffering, — so, in like man- 
ner, do we know that out of the grave of his present tribula- 
tion — out of the trials of to-day, Pius IX, or Pius the Ninth's 
euccessor, — for the Pope lives forever, — will rise more glori- 
ous in his empire over the world, and in his influence and 



272 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



power, all the more glorious for having passed through the 
tribulations of the present time [loud cheers]. But, my 
friends, just as the most precious hours in the life of our 
Lord were the hours of His suffering, — -just as that was the 
particular time when every loving heart came to Him — the 
time when the highest privileges were conferred upon man- 
kind, namely, to wipe the sweat and blood off His brow; to 
take the Cross off His shoulders ; to lift Him from His falling, 
and His faintness upon the earth ; so, also, the present is the 
hour of our highest privilege as Catholics, when we can put 
out our hand to cheer, to console, to help our Holy Father 
the Pope [cheers]. This hall is crowded ; and, from my 
priestly, Catholic, and Irish heart, I am proud of it [vehem- 
ent cheers]. It is easy to acclaim a man when he is " on the 
top of the wheel," as they say, and everything is going well 
with him. It is easy to feel proud of the Pope when the 
Pope shines out, acknowledged by all the kings of the earth. 
Ah, but it is the triumph of Catholic and of Irish faith, to 
stand up for him, to uphold him before the world, and, if 
necessary, to fight for him, when the whole world is against 
him (great cheering]. Therefore, I hope, that when the pro- 
ceeds of this lecture are sent to the man, who, although poor, 
and in prison to-day, has kept his honor, has kept his nobil- 
ity of character ; and when millions were put before him by 
the robber-king, said he would not dirty his hands by touch- 
ing them (cheers) ; — but when the honest and the clean 
money of to-night shall be sent to him, I hope that some one 
of those officials here will also inform him that that money 
was sent to him with cheers, and with applause, and from lov- 
ing and generous Irish Catholic hearts (cheers) ; that it was 
given, as Ireland always has given when she gave, — given 
with a free hand and a loving and a generous heart (cheers). 
As a great author and writer of our day said, " I would 
rather get a cold potato from an Irishman, than a guinea in 
gold and a dinner of beef from an Englishman " [laughter 
and cheers]. 

And, now, my friends, I have only to state to you that, 
from my heart, I thank you for your presence here this eve- 
ning. I know that the sacredness of the cause brought you 
here as Catholics. I flatter myself, a little, that, perhaps, 
some of you came, because, when I was last here before you, 
I told you, in all sincerity, that my heart and soul were in 
tfiis lecture, and that I would take it as a personal favor if 
the hall were crowded this evening. The hall is crowded ; 
and I am grateful to you for your attendance, and your 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



273 



patience in listening to me, and for the encouragement that 
yon gave me by your applause [loud cheering, amid which 
the eloquent lecturer retired]. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Sunday evening 
May 19, in St. Andrew's Church, City Hall Place, New York.] 

"the immaculate conception." 



" Thou art the glory of Jerusalem ; thou art the joy of Israel ; thou 
art the honor of our people." 

These words, dearly beloved brethren, are found in the 
book of Judith, and they commemorate a great and eventful 
period of Jewish history. At that time the Assyrian King 
sent a mighty army, under his General, Holofernes, to subdue 
all the nations of the earth, and to oblige them not only to 
forego their national existence, but also to conform to the 
religion and the rights of the Assyrians. This great army 
the Scriptures describe to us as invincible. Their horses cov- 
ered the plains ; their soldiers filled the valleys ; there was 
no power upon the earth able to resist them ; until at length 
they came before a city of Juclea, called Bethulia. They 
summoned the fortress and commanded the soldiers to surren- 
der. Now, in that town there was a woman by the name of 
Judith. The Scripture says of her that she was a holy 
woman ; that she fasted every day of her life, and that though 
young and fair and beautiful to behold, she lived altogether 
a secluded life, absorbed in prayer to God. When she saw 
the outlying army of the Assyrians — when she heard the 
proud claims of their general : that the people of her race, 
of her nation, should resign not only their national life, but 
also their religion, and forsake the God of Israel — she arose 
in the might of holiness and in the power of her strength, 
and she went forth from the city of Bethulia ; she sought 
the Assyrian camp ; she was brought into the presence of 
Holofernes himself ; and at the mid hour of night, while he 
was sunk in his drunken slumbers, she twined her hand around 
the hair of his head ; she drew his own sword from the scab- 
bard that hung by the bed, and she cut off his head, and 
brought it back in triumph to her people. The morning 
12- 



274 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



came. The army found themselves without their general* 
The Jewish soldiers and people rushed down upon them, and 
there was a mighty slaughter and a scattering of the enemies 
of God and of Israel. And then the people, returning, met 
this wonderful woman ; and the High Priest said to her 
these words : " Thou art the glory of Jersualem ; thou art 
the joy of Israel ; thou art the honor of our people." 

How, dearly beloved, this is not the only woman recorded 
in Scripture who did great things for the people and for the 
Church of God ; and the word of Scripture, as applied to her, 
was meant in a higher and a greater sense ; it was meant 
directly for Judith ; but it was meant in a far higher and 
nobler sense for her of whom I am come to speak to you this 
evening, — the Virgin Mother, who brought forth our Lord 
Jesus Christ into this earth. To Mary does the word apply 
especially, as every great, heroic woman who appears in 
Scripture typified her. The sister of Moses, who led the 
choirs of the daughters of Israel ; the daughter of Jeptha, 
who laid down her virgin life for her people ; Deborah, who 
led the hosts of Israel ; the mother of the Maccabees, stand- 
ing in the blood of her seven sons, — these, and all such 
women of whom the Scriptures make mention, were all types 
of the higher, the greater — the real, yet the ideal woman, 
who was in the designs of God to be " the glory of Jerusa- 
lem, the joy of Israel, and the honor of her people;" namely: 
the Blessed and Immaculate Virgin Mary. It is of the first 
of her graces that I am come to speak to you. The first of 
her graces was her immaculate conception. Let us consider 
this, aud we shall see how she is " the glory of Jerusalem, 
the joy of Israel," and the honor of our race and of our 
people. 

Dearly beloved, we know that, before the eyes of God, 
before the mind of God, before the eternal council of God, 
there is no such thing as past and future as we behold it in 
the course of time, and as we consider it. In the past, this 
world's history is before the Almighty God at this moment 
as if it were at this moment taking place. All that we can 
do in the future, even to the uttermost limits of eternity, is 
before the mind of God now, as if it were actually taking 
place under his eyes ; for the difference between time and 
eternity is this : that in time — that is to say, in the span of 
our life and in the span of the world's history — everything 
comes in succession; event follows event, and each moment 
of time follows the moment that went before it ; but in eter- 
nity, — in time as viewed in relation to God, when time 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



275 



assumes the infinite dimensions of eternity, — there is neither 
past nor future, but all is present under the eye of God, cir- 
cumscribed by His infinite vision and His infinite wisdom. 
Therefore, all that ever was to take place in time, was seen 
and foreseen by the Almighty God. He foresaw the creation 
of man, although that creation did not come until after the 
eternal years that never had a beginning. And so He fore- 
saw the fall of man ; how the first of our race was to pollute 
his own nature by sin, and in that personal pollution was to 
pollute our whole nature, because our nature came from Him. 
Just as when a man poisons the fountain-head of a river, — 
goes up unto the mountains, finds the little spring from which 
the river comes, that afterwards, passing into the valley, 
enlarges its bed and swells in its dimensions until it rolls a 
mighty torrent into the ocean ; — if you go up into the moun- 
tain ; — if you poison the fountain-head of the little stream 
that comes out from under the rock ; — all the waters that 
flow in the river-bed shall be infected and poisoned; because 
the spring and the source of the river is tainted. 

So also, in Adam, our nature sinned. He lay at the fountain- 
head of humanity ; and the whole stream of nature that flowed 
from him came down to you and to me with the taint and 
poison of sin in our blood and in our veins. Therefore does 
the Apostle say that " we are all born children of the wrath of 
God ; ! ' therefore did the prophet of old say : "For behold 
I was conceived in iniquity and in sin did my mother bring 
me forth."' God saw and foresaw all this from eternity ; He 
saw that His creature man, whom He made so pure, so perfect, 
so holy, was to be spoiled and tainted by sin. In that univer- 
sal corruption, the Almighty God reserved to himself one, 
and only one of the race of mankind, and preserved that one 
specimen of our race unpolluted, untainted, unfallen. That 
one was the Blessed Virgin Mary. Certainly such a one must 
have existed : because the Scripture, — the inspired word of 
God, — speaks of such a one when it says, in the language of 
the psalmist : " Thou art all fair, my beloved, and there is 
no spot nor stain on thee.'' Who is she? Is she multiplied ? 
Is she found here and there among the daughters oi men ? 
No ; she is one and only one. Therefore the Scripture says : 
K My beloved, my love, my clove is one and only one among 
the daughters." " Una es colomba mea, amata mea-, sorer 
mea intre filius? That one was the Blessed Virgin Mary. 
God took her and preserved her from the stream of corruption 
that infected our whole nature. God folded His arms of infin- 
ite sanctity around her and took her in the very first moments 



276 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



of her existence, — nay in the eternal decree that went before 
that existence. He folded her in the arms of His own infinite 
sanctity ; and she is the one to whom shade or thought of sin 
or evil has never been allowed to approach. Why is this ? 
Because, dearly beloved, she was destined from all eternity to 
be the Mother of God, incarnate in her own human nature. 
The language of the Church is: "He was incarnate of tho 
Holy Ghost, of the Virgin Mary, and was made man." She 
was destined from all eternity to be the Mother of God, — to 
give to the Almighty God that humanity, that body, that 
flesh and blood which He was to assume in His own divine 
person, and to make one with God by the unity of one divine 
person, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Reflect 
upon this. 

The Scriptures expressly tell us that nothing defiled can 
approach to God — that nothing with the slightest speck or 
stain of sin upon it can come near God. Therefore, it is that 
in proportion as men approach to God, in the same propor- 
tion are they immaculate. Almighty God tells us in the 
Scripture, expressly, that, although all men were born in sin, 
yet there were a few, a very few, who were excepted from 
that general rule, because they were allowed to approach so 
near God. The prophet Jeremias was excepted from that 
rule ; and he was sanctified before he came forth from his 
mother's womb. " Before thou earnest forth from thy mother, 
I sanctified thee," said the Lord. And why? Because he 
was destined to be a prophet, and to propound the word of 
God to the people. John the Baptist was sanctified in his 
mother's womb, and came forth in his birth free from the 
original sin of Adam, because he was destined to be the one 
among men to say : " Behold the lamb of God who takes 
away the sins of the world." And if these men — one because 
he was to preach the word of God, another because he was to 
point out God to man — if they, because of this high function, 
were born without sin, surely, dearly beloved, we must con- 
clude that the woman who was to give God His sacred human- 
ity, the woman who was to be the mother of God, the woman 
who was to afford to the Almighty God that blood by which 
He wiped out the sins of the world, that woman must receive 
far more than either John the Baptist or Jeremias received ; 
and the grace that she received must have been the grace of 
her conception without sin. And, in truth, as nothing 
defiled, nothing tainted, was ever allowed to approach 
Almighty God, the woman who approached him nearest of 
all the daughters of the earth, who came nearer to God than 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



277 



all His angels in Heaven were allowed tc approach Him, 
must be the only one of whom the Scripture speaks when it 
says : "My beloved is one and only one, and she is aLl fair, 
and there is no spot nor stain in her." 

What follows from this? It follows that the immaculate 
woman who was destined to be the mother of Jesus Christ 
received at the first moment of her being a grace inconceiv- 
ably greater than all the grace that was given to all the angels 
in heaven, to all the saints upon the earth, because the dig- 
nity in which she was created was inconceivably greater than 
theirs. The highest angel in heaven was made but to be the 
servant of God ; Mary was created to be the mother of God. 
What was that grace? Perfect purity, perfect sinlessness, 
perfect immaculateness, and consequently perfect love of God 
and highest union with Him. For, reflect, my dear friends, 
wheresoever the human soul is found perfectly free from sin, 
without spot or stain of sin, without the slightest inclination 
or temptation of sin, — wheresoever such a soul is found, that 
soul is united to the Almighty God by the Highest, by the 
most perfect and the most intimate union of divine love. 
God loves all His creatures ; God loves the soul of man ; so 
that wherever He finds that there is no impediment of sin, no 
distortion of inclination, nothing to hinder that union, He 
gives himself to that soul in the most intimate and highest 
form of love ; and He gathers that soul to him by a most 
perfect union. Hence it is that perfect union with God and 
perfect sinlessness mean one and the same thing. 

The Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, was 
kept and held aside to let the stream of sin flow by without 
touching her. The only one in whom our nature was pre- 
served in all its pristine beauty and perfection, the blessed 
Virgin Mary in that sinlessness of her conception, attained, 
at the moment of her conception the most perfect and inti- 
mate union with God. And this, — for which all the saints 
and all holy souls strive on the earth, — the very highest cli- 
max of saintly perfection, — was the first beginning of her 
sanctity. The saint who wearies himself during the sixty or 
beventy years of his life, the Eremite in the desert, the martyr 
in the arena, all aim at this one thing — to purge their souls 
most perfectly from sin, from every mortal and venial sin ; 
to rise above their passions and their lower and sinful nature ; 
and in proportion as they attain to this do they climb the 
summit of perfection and attain to closer union with God. 
That which all the saints tend to, — that which all the virgins 
and saints in the Church thirst for, — that which they con- 



278 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

sider as the very summit of their perfection, — that is, the 
grace that was given to Mary at the first moment of her 
being — namely, to be perfectly pure, perfectly sinless, per- 
fectly immaculate, consequently perfectly united to God by 
supreme and most intimate union. And this is the meaning 
of the word of Scripture : " The foundations of her are laid upou 
the holy mountains. The Lord loves the threshold of Zion 
more than all the tabernacles and tents of Judah;" more 
than all the accumulated perfection of all the angels and saints 
of God. Where they end is the beginning of Mary's perfec- 
tion in His sight. 

And now let me apply the text, " Thou art the glory of 
Jerusalem; thou art the joy of Israel; thou art the honor 
of our people." Whenever the Scriptures speak figuratively 
or spiritually of Jerusalem, they always allude to the King- 
dom of Heaven, the kingdom of the just made perfect. The 
Church of God, dearly beloved, consists of three great 
elements or portions. There is the Church that purges, in 
Purgatory, the elect of God, by the slow action of divine jus- 
tice, cleansing them from every stain and paying the last far- 
thing of their debt. That is the Church suffering. There is 
the Church on earth, contending against the world, the flesh 
and the devil ; fighting a hard and weary battle, which you 
and I are obliged to fight every day of our lives. We are 
obliged to fight against our passions and subdue them. We 
are obliged to fight against the powers of darkness seeking 
our destruction and subdue them. We are obliged to 'fight 
with the world, surrounding us with evil maxims, with its 
loose principles, with its false ideas of morality, with its bad 
example; and, despising all these, to conquer them. We are 
obliged to fight the battle of our faith. We are obliged to 
enter upon this and other questions, and upon these questions 
to take our stand as Catholics, and to fight the good fight of 
faith. The question of sacraments, the question of education, 
the question of the Church, the question of the Pope, the 
question of the injustice of the world in robbing him of all 
his power and of his dignity; these, and a thousand others, 
are the burden of the Church's battle on this earth ; and, 
therefore, she is called the Church Militant. But high above 
the Suffering Church or the Militant Church is still the 
Church of God. Having passed through the battle-field of 
earth, having passed through the purgation of Purgatory, 
and having attained to the vision of God, there she triumphs; 
there she rejoices in the undiminished glory and the uncrea- 
ted brightness of God; — and that is the Church Triumphant. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



279 



Now, the Scriptures, speaking of that Kingdom of Heaven, or 
of the Church Triumphant, mentions it under the name of 
Jerusalem. 

For instance, " I saw," says the inspired evangelist, "the 
Xew Jerusalem descending from Heaven, as a bride arrayed 
for her bridegroom." St. Paul, speaking of the same king- 
dom, says, ; ' Thou art come to Mount Zion, and to the city 
of the living God, and to Jerusalem, and to the kingdom of 
the just made perfect." Jerusalem, therefore, as expressed 
in the words of my text, " Thou art the glory of Jerusalem," 
means the Church Triumphant. It means the glorious assem- 
blage of all the angels of God ; it means the glorious society 
of all the saints of God; it means that all that Heaven 
or earth ever held or had of the noble, generous, self-sacrific- 
ing and devoted is now crowned with the everlasting glory 
of the presence of God. And, of that assemblage of the 
Church Triumphant, Mary is the glory. She is the glory ; 
and why ? Because, as the Scripture tells us expressly, the 
angels of God are interested in the affairs of this world. Our 
Lord, speaking of little children, says, " Woe to you who 
scandalize them ; because their angels see the face of my 
Father." Elsewhere he says : " There is more joy in Heaven 
for one sinner doing penance than for ninety-nine just who 
need not repentance." If, then, the angels in Heaven rejoice 
at every new manifestation of the glory and omnipotence of 
God : if their glory is to contemplate the Almighty God in 
His works, it follows that whenever we see these works 
destroyed, whenever they see the purposes of the Almighty 
God frustrated, whenever they see the work and the mercy of 
God ruined, they must grieve as far as they are capable of 
grieving, because they rejoice when that work is restored by 
repentance. They, therefore, looking down from their high 
places in Heaven, beheld with great joy the new-born race of 
men ; they beheld the work of God, most perfect in our first 
parents, Adam and Eve. They saw in the first woman that 
was created the woman that was destined in her progeny to 
people Heaven with saints, and to fill the thrones that were 
left vacant there by the defection of the rebel angels. Their 
glory was that their choirs before God might be filled, and 
that the chorus of Heavenly music might be perfect in its 
harmony by the filling of their places. They saw that one- 
third of their angelic brethren had fallen into hell, and left 
the halls of Heaven more or less vacant by their fall. They 
waited, — they waited lor many years, — we know not how 
long : we know not but that that time of waiting may have 



280 



THB CATHOLIC MISSION. 



extended for thousands of years ; — until, at length, they be- 
held the Creator make the new creature, man. They knew 
the destinies of man ; they knew that this woman who was 
created upon the earth was to be the mother of the race that 
was to fill up their choirs, and to fulfil and make perfect their 
glory in Heaven. Oh, how sad was their disappointment! — 
oh, how terrible was their grief when they saw Eve fall into 
sin and become the mother of a race of reprobates, and not 
of saints, and her destiny change ; that she should people hell 
with reprobates rather than fulfil her high destiny and people 
Heaven with saints. Mary arose. The earth beheld her face. 
Her coming was as the rising of the morning star, which, 
trembling in its silver beauty over the eastern hills, tells the 
silent and the darkened world that the bright sun is about to 
follow it and dispel the darkness of the night by the splendor 
and the brightness of its shining. Mary arose ; and when 
the angels of God beheld her, their glory was fulfilled ; for 
now they knew that the mother of saints was come, and that 
the woman was created who was to do what had failed in 
Eve, — to people heaven and fill heaven's choirs with the 
progeny of saints in everlasting glory. Therefore did they 
hail her coming with angelic joy. Oh, what joy was theirs 
when they looked down upon the earth and beheld the fallen 
race of man restored in all its first integrity in Mary ! Oh, 
what joy was theirs who rejoiced when Magdalen arose in all 
the purity of her repentance, — they who rejoice and make 
the vaults of heaven ring with their joy when you or I make 
a good confession, and do penance for our sins ! Ob, what 
must their joy have been, and the riot of their delight and of 
their glory, when Mary arose, and they beheld, in her, the 
mother of all those who are ever to be saved, the mother of 
all true penitents, the mother of all the elect of God ; for 
becoming the mother of Jesus Christ, she has become the 
mother of all the race of man. Therefore she is the glory of 
the heavenly Jerusalem. Therefore did these angels, on the 
day of her assumption, joyfully come to heaven's gate, and 
fill the mid-air with the sound of their triumph, when heaven's 
queen, the mother of God, was raised to the place of her 
glory. "The morning stars prised the Lord together, and 
all the suns of God made a joyful noise." The glory of Jeru- 
salem, the angel's glory is concentrated in the glory of God. 
Whatever gives glory to God glorifies them. Now, in all 
the works of God he is most glorified in Mary, as we shall 
see ; and therefore Mary is the glory of the heavenly Jerusa- 
lem, and the delight of God's blessed spirits and angels in his 
everlasting kingdom. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



281 



But she is more ; she is " the joy of Israel." What is 
this Israel ? Jerusalem was the summit of Israel's triumphs. 
Israel had to fight for many a weary year before the founda- 
tions of the Holy City were laid. Israel, that is to say, the 
Jewish people passed through the desert, crossing the Red 
Sea, fighting with their enemies there to wait for many a long 
and weary year, until the holy city of Jerusalem was raised 
up in all its beauty, and until the temple of God was founded 
there. And just as that city, Jerusalem, represents the Church 
Triumphant, so by the name of Israel the inspired writer 
meant the Church Militant, the Church in the desert of this 
earth, the Church passing through the Red Sea of the mar- 
tyrs' blood ; the Church crossing swords with every enemy of 
God, and fighting and bearing the burden and the heat of the 
day. Of that Church Militant, of that Israel of God, Mary is 
the joy. Why ? Dearly beloved, Christ our Lord founded 
His Church for one express purpose, and it was that, where 
sin had abounded sin might be destroyed and grace abound 
still more. "For this I am come," He says, "that where sin 
hath abounded grace might abound still more." Wherever, 
therefore there is a victory over sin by divine grace, there is 
the joy of the Church Militant, because there is her work 
accomplished. Wherever the sinner rises out of his sin and 
does penance and returns to God, there the Church triumphs, 
her mission is fulfilled, the purpose for which she was created 
is accomplished, and her joy is great in proportion. Now, 
where has grace so abounded as in Mary ? Sin abounded in 
this world. Christ came and shed His blood that grace might 
take the place of sin and superabound where sin had abounded 
before. Where has grace so triumphed over sin as in Mary ? 
Great is the triumph of grace when it expels sin from the sin- 
ner's soul and makes that which was impure to be purified, 
and makes that which was unjust to be glorified by sanctity 
before God. Oh, still greater is the triumph when grace can 
so anticipate sin as never to allow it to make its appearance. 
The most perfect triumph of grace is in the utter exclusion of 
sin. Therefore, it is that Christ our Lord in his sacred human- 
ity was grace itself personified in man, because in Him there 
was essential holiness, and an utter impossibility of the ap- 
proach of sin. If, therefore the joy of the Church be in pro- 
portion to the triumph of grace over sin, surely she must be 
"the joy of Israel" and the first fruits of the Church, the 
only one that this mystical body of Christ can offer to God 
as perfectly acceptable ; tho only soul, the only creature that 
the Church can offer to God and say, " Lord look down from 



282 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

Heaven upon tins child and daughter of thine; she is thy 
beloved in whom there is no spot nor stain. She is the joy of 
Israel." 

Oh, my dearly beloved, need I tell you — you who were 
born in the faith like myself ; you who come from Catholic 
stock, who come from Catholic blood ; you in whose veins, in 
whose Irish veins, hundreds of years of Catholic faith and 
Catholic sanctity are flowing, — need I tell you of the woman 
whose name, preached by Patrick fourteen hundred years 
ago, has been, from that hour to this, Ireland's greatest con- 
solation in the midst of her sorrows ? In the loss of fortune, 
in the loss of property, in the loss of liberty, in the loss of 
national existence, every Irish Catholic has been consoled in 
the midst of his privations, by the thought that the mother 
of Gocl loved him, and that he had a claim upon Mary Mother. 
Well do I remember one whose expression embodied all of 
Irish faith and Irish love for Mary ; an old woman whom I 
met, weeping over a grave, lying there with a broken heart, 
waiting only for the kind hand of Death to put her into the 
dust where all she had loved had gone before her; forgotten 
by all, abandoned by all, the hand of misery and poverty 
upon her; and when I would console her and speak to her of 
heaven and of heaven's glory; when I endeavored to lighten 
the burden of her sorrow by consolation, she turned to me 
and said : ' ; Oh, father, you need not speak to me. The cross 
maybe heavy, but the Virgin Mary's cross was heavier than 
mine." She forgot her sorrows in her great love for Mary. 
Kay, that love, even in her sorrow, was as a gleam of hope, 
one ray of joy let in upon the soul that otherwise might have 
despaired. And thus it is that Mary — the knowledge of her 
love for us, the knowledge of our claim upon her through her 
divine Son, and in the knowledge of the divine commission 
that He gave her upon the Cross, to be the mother of all that 
were ever to love Him, — is the one ray of joyful and divine 
consolation that Christ our Lord lets in upon every wounded 
spirit and every loving, grieving heart. 

Finally, she is " the honor of our people." Dear friends, 
the Almighty God when He created us made man in per- 
fection. " Deits fecit hom&nem rectum" He gave to man a 
mighty intelligence, a high and a pure love, and a freedom of 
will asserting the dominion of the soul over the body, and 
through that body the dominion of man over all creatures. 
Everything on this earth obeyed Him. The eagle, flying in 
the upper air, closed his wings and came to pay homage to 
the unfallen man. The lion and the tiger, at the sound oi 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



283 



His voice, came forth from their lairs to lick the feet of their 
imperial master, the unfallen man. As everything without 
Him was obedient to Him, so everything within Him was 
obedient to the dictates of His clear reason and to the 
empire of His nnf alien will. In this was the honor of God 
reflected as it was invested in man. God gave him intelli- 
gence. God is wisdom; His wisdom was invested in man. 
God gave him love. God is love; and the purity of that 
love was reflected in the affections of unfallen man. God is 
power, empire, and freedom ; and the empire of God, and the 
freedom of God were reflected in the free will of man, in the 
imperial sway in which He commanded all creatures. Thus 
was the honor of God invested in us. Now, sin came and 
destroyed all this perfection. The serpent came and whispered 
his temptation in the ears of the vain and foolish woman, 
who, unmindful of all that she had, risked all and lost all 
for the gratification of her appetite and of her womanly- 
curiosity. The serpent came and told Eve to rebel against 
God. Eve rebelled; she induced Adam to rebel; and, in 
this two-fold rebellion, man lost all that God had given 
him of grace and of supernatural gifts. All of divine honor 
that God Almighty had reflected in man, all of divine 
glory that he had imparted to man, all was lost; the intel- 
ligence was darkened; the affections were depraved; the 
freedom of the soul was enslaved, and man was no longer 
the high, and pure, and perfect image of his Creator. 

Now, as we have seen in that sin of Adam, not only was 
that man himself destroyed and corrupted, but the whole 
nature of mankind was destroyed in him. How is Mary the 
honor of our people ? She is the honor of our people in this, 
that where all was ruined, she alone was preserved ; that, but 
for her and her immaculate conception, neither God in 
Heaven, nor saints nor angels in Heaven, nor any man upon 
the earth would ever again look upon the face of unfallen 
man. The work of God would have been completely 
destroyed; not a vestige would remain of what man was as 
he came from his Creator's hand, but that the Almighty pre- 
served one unfallen specimen of our race, to show His angels 
and His saints in Heaven, and to show all men upon the earth, 
what a glorious humanity was the untainted nature which 
God had invested in man. She is the solitary boast of our 
fallen nature. Take Mary away ; deprive her of tl e grace 
of her immaculate conception ; let the slightest taint of sin 
come in ; — she is spoiled like the rest of us : and the 
Almighty God has not retained, in the destruction of our 



284 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



race, one single specimen of unfallen nature. But not so, foi 
God in all His works may allow His enemy to prevail against 
Him ; He may allow the spirit of evil to come in and spoil 
and taint and destroy His works ; but He never allows His 
work to be utterly destroyed ; never. "When mankind fell 
from God and from grace, so that the image of God disap- 
peared, and the spirit of God from among them; and the 
Almighty found it necessary to destroy the whole race of 
man in the Deluge, — He preserved. Noah, and his sons, and 
his daughters. Eight souls were preserved, while hundreds 
of millions were destroyed ; but God, in these eight souls, 
preserved the race and did not allow the spirit of evil to 
utterly destroy His work. When God drew back again the 
bolts of heaven, and allowed the living fire of His wrath to 
fall uj^on Sodom and Gomorrah, and destroyed the whole 
nation, yet, even then, He saved Lot and his family; and a 
few were saved, where all the rest were lost. "When the 
Almighty resolved to destroy, for their impurity, the race of 
Benjamin, yet He preserved a few. lest the whole tribe might 
be utterly destroyed. 

And thus it is that we find the Almighty God always 
preserving one or two or three specimens of His work, lest 
the devil might glory over much, and riot in his joy for hav- 
ing utterly destroyed the work of God. Our nature was 
destroyed in Eve. One fair specimen of all that would be in 
us, — of all that was in Adam before his sin, — of all that God 
intended us to be, — one fair specimen of all this was preserved 
in Mary, who, in her immaculate conception, enshrined in 
the infinite holiness of God, was preserved untainted and 
unfallen, as if Adam had never sinned. It may be asked, if, 
then, this woman was without sin, if she was conceived 
without sin, how is it that she calls Christ hei Saviour, 
saying: "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit 
hath rejoiced in God, my Saviour." Oh, my friends, need I 
tell you that Christ our Lord is as much the Saviour of Mary 
as He is your Saviour or mine ? Need I tell you that, but 
for His incarnation, but for His suffering and passion and 
death, Mary could not have received the grace of her immac- 
ulate conception, any more than you or I could have received 
the grace of our baptism ? Baptism has done for us, as far 
as regards the removal of original sin, all that her immacu- 
late conception did for Maiy. For the four thousand years 
that went before the. incarnation of the Son of God, every 
child of Adam that was saved, was saved through the antici* 
pated merits of the blood that was shed upon Calvary 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



285 



Adam liimself was saved, Moses was saved, Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, Daniel, all the prophets, all the saints were 
saved by their faith in the Son of God, and by their pre- 
vision of His merits before His Eternal Father. The merits 
of the Son of God, as yet nnincarnate, yet foreseen and 
applied, thousands of years before their time, to the souls of 
the patriarchs and the prophets, — the self-same merits were 
applied to the soul of Mary in the eternal design of God, in 
her immaculate conception. He is as much her Saviour as 
He is ours ; only He saved her in a way quite different from 
that in which Ave were saved. You may save a man, for 
instance, by keeping him from going into the way of danger ; 
you may save a child by taking it out of the street, when 
some dangerous procession is passing, or when some railway 
engine is passing — something that may endanger its life ; or 
you may save the same child, when in immediate danger, by 
the touch of your powerful and saving hand, and restore it to 
life. So, the Almighty God saved Mary by preventing the evil, 
just as He saves us by cleansing us from the evil which has 
already fallen on us. Hence it is that she, more than any of 
us, had reason to call Christ, her son, her Lord and her 
Saviour. " My soul doth magnify the Lord," she said, " and 
my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Truly He was 
her Saviour. Truly He shows His power in the manner in 
which He saved her. He did not permit her to be immersed 
in the ocean of sin. He did not take her, as something filthy 
and defiled, and wash her soul in the laver of baptism. ; but 
he applied the graces of baptism to her conception ; so that 
she came into this world ail pure, all holy, all immaculate, 
just as the Christian child comes forth from the baptismal 
font. 

Behold then how she is the glory of the Heavenly Jerusa- 
lem, the joy of the earthly Church of Israel and the honor of 
our people ; seeing that if Mary were not as she is in Heaven, 
immaculate and unstained, that Heaven would be, after all, 
only a congregation of penitents. Every other soul that 
enters Heaven enters as a Magdalen — at least, as Magdalen ris- 
ing from original sin. Mary alone entered Heaven, as Eve 
would have entered if she had resisted the evil and conquered 
the temptation of sin. Thus do we behold, the Mother 
of God as she shines forth before us in the prophecy of Scrip- 
ture — an honor and a triumph and a symbol of God's complete 
victory. The victory that God gains over sin is not complete 
when lie has to come to remedy that evil after it has fallen 
upon the soul. The complete triumph of God is when He is 



286 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



able to preserve the soul from any approach of that evil, and 
to keep it in all its original purity and immaculateness and 
innocence. 

Such was the woman whom the prophet beheld : " And 
a great sign appeared in Heaven — a woman clothed with the 
sun and the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of 
twelve stars." Of what was this woman a sign ? She was 
the sign of the victory of God, for he adds : " And I saw 
another sign in Heaven, a great dragon coming to devour the 
woman and to destroy her ; but it was cast forth and there 
was no room for him nor place for him anywhere in Heaven." 
And Mary shone forth, in the eternal council of God, the very 
sign and type, promise and symbol of God's victory over sin 
God's victory over sin was complete, as every victory of God 
is ; and the completeness of that victory was embodied in the 
immaculate conception of Mary. 

What wonder, then, my dearly beloved, that we should 
honor one whom God has so loved to honor. "What 
wonder that we should hail her as all pure : hail her from 
earth, whom God hailed from Heaven, saying: " Thou art all 
pure, my beloved, and there is no stain in thee." What 
wonder that we should rejoice in her who is the joy and the 
glory of the heavenly Jerusalem. What wonder that we 
should sing praises to her ; put her forth as the very type 
of purity, innocence and virtue, whom the Almighty God so 
filled with all His highest gifts, that Heaven and earth never 
beheld such a creature as Mary ; that the very angel, coming 
down from before the throne of God, was astonished when he 
beheld her greatness ; and, bending in his human form before 
her, said: "All hail to thee, O Mary, for thou art full of 
grace ;" and when she trembled at his words, he assured say- 
ing : " Fear not, O Mary, for thou hast found grace before 
the Lord." Oh, how grand was her finding ! Grace was 
lost by the first woman, Eve : and every daughter of earth 
sought it for four thousand years and found it not. How 
could they find it ? They came into this world without it. 
How could they find that grace which Eve had lost ? They 
came tainted by Eve's sin upon this earth. Mary alone found 
it — the grace of immaculate creation, the grace of primeval 
purity. Therefore, the angel said to her : — " Fear not, I tell 
thee thou shalt be the mother of God, and that He that is to 
be born of thee shall be called the Son of the Most High. 
Yet, O woman, fear not, for I say to thee, that thou has 
found grace before the Lord." Therefore do we honor her, 
my dearly beloved ; therefore do we rejoice that she, being 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



287 



such as she is, is still our mother and regards us with a 
mother's love ; and we can look up to her with the unsus- 
pecting and all-confiding love of childhood. Oh, mothei 
mine ! — oh, mother of all the nations ! — oh, mother that kept 
the faith in that land of our mothers, that through tempta- 
tion and suffering never lost her love for thee — that famished 
and famine-stricken never lost the faith, — I hail thee ! Aa 
thou art in heaven, to-night, clothed with the sun of divine 
justice, with the moon reflecting all earthly virtues beneath 
thy feet, and upon thy head a crown of twelve stars, — God's 
brightest gift, — I hail thee, O mother ! And in the name of 
the Catholic Church, and in the name of my Catholic people, 
and in the name of the far-off and loved land that ever loved 
thee, I proclaim that " thou art the glory of Jerusalem, thou 
art the joy of Israel, and thou art the honor of our people." 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Sunday, June 8, 
in St. Michael's Church, Thirty-first Street and Ninth Avenue, New 
York.] 

"the blessed eucharist." 



Dearly Beloyed Brethren : In this wonderful age of 
ours, there is nothing that creates in the thinking mind so 
much astonishment and wonder as the fact that the Catholic 
Church stands before the world in all the grandeur of her 
truthfulness, and that the intellect of this age of ours seems 
incapable of apprehending her claims, or of acknowledging her 
grandeur. Men in every walk of life are in pursuit of the true 
and the beautiful. The poet seeks it in his verse, the philoso- 
pher in his speculations, the statesman in his legislation, the 
artist in the exhibition of his art. And, while all men pro- 
fess thus to pursue the true and the beautiful, they wilfully 
shut their eyes against that which is the truest and most beau- 
tiful of all things upon the earth — the Holy Catholic Church 
of Jesus Christ. I don't know whether there be any Pro- 
testants among you here to-day ; I believe there are not. 
But whether they be here, or whether they be absent, I weep, 
in my heart and soul over their blindness and their folly,— 
that they cannot recognize the only religion which ig 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



289 



logical, because it is true; — the only Church which can 
afiord to stand before the whole world, and bear the shock of 
every mind, and the criticism of every intellect, because she 
comes from God. Now amid the many features of Divine 
beauty and grandeur and harmony that the Almighty God 
has set upon the face of the Catholic Church, the first and the 
greatest of her mysteries, — the greatest of her beauties, both 
intellectual and spiritual, — is the awful presence of Jesus 
Christ who makes himself, really and truly, here, an abiding 
and present God in the Blessed Eucharist. I have chosen 
this presence as the subject and theme of my observations to 
you to-day, because we are yet celebrating — (within the 
octave) — the festival of Corpus Christi. We are yet in spirit 
with our holy mother, the Church, at the foot of the altar, 
adoring, in an especial manner, Him who is here present at 
all times ; and rejoicing, with a peculiar joy, upon that grace, 
surpassing all graces, which the Almighty God has given to 
His Church, in the abiding presence of Jesus Christ among 
us. 

Most of you, I dare say, know that what I propose to you 
to-day is to consider that presence as the fulfilment of the 
designs of God, and the fulfilment of all the wants of. man. 
If I can show you what these designs are, and what these 
wants are, and if I can sufficiently indicate to you that they 
are fulfiled only in the Blessed Eucharist — then, my brethren, 
I conclude without the slightest hesitation, that in no form of 
religion, — in no Church, — can the designs of God and the 
wants of man meet their fulfilment, save in that one Church, 
—in that one holy religion, in which Christ is substantiated, 
under the form of bread and wine in the Blessed Euchaiist. 
In order to do this I have to ask you to reflect with me what 
are the designs of God upon man. 

There are three remarkable and magnificent epochs that 
mark the action of Almighty God upon his creature man. 
The first of these was the moment of creation, when God 
made man. The second was the time of redemption, when 
God, becoming incarnate, offered Himself as the victim for 
man. The third epoch was the institution of the Blessed 
Sacrament, when God left Himself to be the food of His chil- 
dren, and to be made one with them by the highest and the 
most intimate communion of a present God, through all ages. 
To each of these three epochs I shall invite your attention 
when I attempt to explain to you the designs of God. 

In the first of these, — that is to say in the act of creation, 
—we find God stamping His image on man, in order that in 



290 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



God is the highest and most intimate love ; there is no free- 
dom there, but only the necessity of God, — nature's law and 
instinct : the whole world, — in all its beauty, in all its har- 
mony, — still wants its soul ; for that soul, wherever it is to 
be, must be something like to God. Finally, when all things 
were prepared, God took of the slime of the earth, and made 
and fashioned with His hands a new creature, — a creature 
that was to rise and to uplift his eyes and behold the sun ; a 
creature whose every form of material existence was to remain 
perfectly distinct from all other forms of creation. Into this 
creature's face the Almighty God breathed His own image 
and likeness, in an imperishable spirit, — an immortal soul. 
Before He made this soul the mirror of Himself, — He took 
thought with Himself, and said no longer " let it be ! " but 
— counselling with His own Divine wisdom, he said : " Let us 
make man unto our own image and likeness." And 
unto His own image and likeness, therefore, He made him, 
for He breathed upon him the inspiration of spiritual life, — a 
living soul into the inanimate clay ; — and upon that soul He 
stamped His own Divine image. He gave to that soul the 
light of an intelligence capable of comprehending the power 
of His love, capable of serving Him and loving Him. He 
gave to that soul the faculty of freedom, that by no necessary 
law, — by no iron instinct, was this new creature to act ; but 
with judgment, and with thought, and with intellectual in- 
quiry. He was to act freely, and every action of his life was 
to flow from the fountain of unfettered freedom, like the 
actions of the Almighty God Himself, whose very essence is 
eternal freedom. 

Thus was man created. Behold the image of God stamped 
upon him ! Oh, how, grand how magnificent was this crea- 
ture ! The theory has been mooted in our day, — " Was it 
worth God's while to create the sun, moon and stars, and un- 
told firmaments which no eye of man has yet discovered ; 
those stars far away exceeding our earth in their magnitude ; 
in their splendor ; in their attractive power and beauty ; — was 
it worth God's while, — the astronomer asks, — for the sake of 
giving light to the smallest of the planets, to create so many 
others to revolve around her in space ! " Yes, — I answer- 
it was worth God's while, for one man if He created but one; 
— it was worth his while to create all these material beauties ; 
because man alone, — that one man, — would reflect in his soul 
the image of God — the uncreated and spiritual loveliness of 
his maker. How grand was this first man when he arose from 
the screen mound out of which the Lord created him ! when 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



291 



he opened his eyes and beheld before him, shrouded in soma 
dazzling form of material beauty, the presence of God ! Ho 
opened his eyes ; and seeing this figure of light and trans- 
parency before him, hearing from His lips the harmony of his 
Creator's voice, he knelt in adoration. He alone, of all the 
creatures in the world, was able to appreciate the infinite 
beauty of the Maker ; and springing to that Maker, with all 
the energy of his spirit, he bowed down before Him and offered 
the sacrifice of intellectual praise. He alone, of all the crea- 
tures of God, was able to appreciate the infinite eternity of 
His existence ; His omnipotence ; His infinite goodness, gran- 
deur and beauty. He alone, of all God's creatures, was capa- 
ble of appreciating this soul, — that, out of the appreciation 
of his mind, his heart was moved to love. And he strained 
towards his God with every higher aspiration and affection of 
his spirit. He alone, of all the creatures of God was able 
to say out of the resources of a free and unshackled will : " I 
will love thee ! I will serve thee, O God ! for thou alone art 
worthy of all love and all service for all time ! So, freely 
and deliberately weighing the excellencies of God against all 
created beauty ; calculating with the power of his intelligence 
the claims of God upon him, — he acknowledged these claims 
— he acknowledged in his intellect the potency of that power 
in life ; because of his intellectual appreciation, he decided 
freely to serve God in his life. That free decision from 
the intellect was a Godlike act, of which no other creature 
upon this earth was capable. Therefore, the Almighty 
God appealed to that act as the only test and proof of 
man. 

Thus we see in the beginning that Almighty God stamped 
His image upon his people. And in this He snowed the de- 
sign of His creation : — the greatness of His mercy and of 
His love. He had prepared all things for man. He had made 
all things for him. All things pointed to him ; all nature, 
newly created in all its beauty, still cried out for that crown- 
ing beauty, the beauty of intelligence, the beauty of the 
power of love, the grandeur of freedom. And man was crea- 
ted as the very apex, the very climax of God's creation, the 
crown and the perfection of all. Behold the mercy of God ! 
God might have made this world in all its material yet unin- 
tellectual beauty. He might have left all his creatures to en- 
joy the life that He gave them, and to fulfill the limited and 
necessary sphere of their duties, — and yet never have sent 
intelligence and infinite love and freedom upon them. But 
no ; God wished to behold Himself in his creation. He wished 



292 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



to be able to look down from Heaven and see His image in 
His creation. God wished that all nature should hold up the 
mirror of their resemblance to Him in man. God's design 
was that wherever the child of man existed, there He, looking 
down, should behold His own image in the depths of that 
pure intelligence ; in the depths of those pure affections ; in 
that unshackled, magnificent, imperial freedom of man's 
will. 

This was the first design. Far greater was the second 
design of God's mercy. God knew and foreknew, from all 
eternity, that man, by the abuse of his free will, would turn 
against his God. The Almighty God knew and foreknew, as 
it' it were present before his eyes, — for there is no past, no 
future to the eyes of God ; all things are present to Him ; — 
He knew and foreknew that, in the day when He placed 
Himself and His own divine perfection and His own claims 
on one side, and the Devil made the appeal to the passions 
and pride of man on the other side, — He knew that His free 
creature would decide against Him, — would abandon Him, — 
tell Him to begone, and take all His gifts with. Him, and 
would clutch the animal and base gratifications of a sensual 
pride. God knew this. He knew that, in that act of man, 
man was destined to cloud his clear intelligence so that it 
would no longer reflect the image of God ; — that man was 
destined, in that act, to pollute his pure affections, so that 
they no longer reflected the image of God in love. God fore- 
saw and foreknew that man was destined, in that act of 
rebellion, to fetter and enslave his free will, and to make it 
no longer a servant and minister of his intelligence, but of 
his passions and of his desires. In a word, God saw His own 
image broken and spoiled in man by the sin of Adam. 

Then, my dearly beloved, in these eternal designs of love, 
God said in His own decrees from all eternity, "My image is 
gone; my likeness is shattered; my spirit is no longer 
among them; and I must provide a remedy greater than the 
evil. I will send — in the second plan of my mercy and the 
design of my love, — I will send no longer a renewed image 
in man ; I will not restore what they have broken and des- 
troyed ; but I will send my Eternal Son. He, the reality, 
whom no evil can touch, whom no temptation can conquer, — 
I will put him into man ; and I shall behold, no longer the 
fallen man, but I shall behold, in the redeemed man, myself 
restored in the person of Jesus Christ." Oh, my beloved 
brethren ! does not the infinite mercy, — the all-extending, 
all-grasping love of God, — come in here? He might in His 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



293 



designs of mercy, have restored His broken image in man ; 
He might have given man the power of repentance. He 
might, in ihe largeness of His mercy, wipe away sin, undo 
that most fatal work, and give back to man, in the unclouded 
intelligence, and in the pure heart and in the free will, all 
that man had lost of the divine image by sin. He might 
have done this without at all descending Himself; without 
at all coming down from the throne of His greatness and 
uncreated majesty and glory. No! God resolves to do 
more for the reparation of man than he had ever done in the 
ruin of himself by sin. God resolves .to send His only begot- 
ten Son, who, incarnate by the Holy Ghost, of the Virgin 
Mary, was made man. The Lord Jesus Christ is born of 
the Virgin Mary ; an infant wails upon His mother's bosom ; 
an Infinite God, looking down from heaven, beholds not only 
His own image in man, but beholds Himself in Him, His 
only begotten, coequal and consubstantial Son. Therefore, 
He is no longer the image, but the Man-God. He is no 
longer the likeness of God, but Man — the reality, of God,— 
according to the Scriptures of old : "I have said ye are gods, 
and all of you the sons of the Most High." 

God made us to be His servants. When man refused to 
be a servant, God, in His mercy, lifted him up, and made 
him a son. Instead of taking the children of men and bind- 
ing us together, as a bundle of faggots, and flinging us into 
hell, and in His greatness and glory forgetting us all; — 
instead of doing this, when God saw that we were fallen, and 
that not even His image remained in man, in the destruction 
of grace, and in the partial destruction of the perfection of 
his nature, — He sent His only begotten Son : so that the 
creature, instead of being punished by eternal ruin and ban- 
ishment, is raised, by redemption, and made a son of God. 
" To those who received Him, He gave the power to become 
the sons of God." Can you comprehend this mercy? Do 
you ever reflect upon it ? I sinned in Adam. Sinning thus 
in Adam, I deserved to be cast away from God, and never 
see His face again. I sinned in Adam. Sinning thus, I lost 
all that God gave me of grace, and a great deal that He gave 
me of good. Instead of flinging me aside, Almighty God 
comes down from Heaven, becomes my brother ; and says :— 
" Brother; all that I am in Heaven, — the Son of God, — I am 
willing to make you by adoption. My Father is willing to 
take you in as my younger brother. My Father is willing to 
acknowledge that all I am by nature you are by the grace of 
adoption." So, in the work of redemption, — in the second 



294 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



design of God, — we rise to the grandeur and dignity of a 
more sublime position than in Adam. We become the 
younger brethren of God Himself. We become members of 
the household and of the family of Jesus Christ. 

But, you will say to me, what connection has this with 
the Blessed Eucharist? You engage to show us that the 
designs of God were fulfilled in the Real Presence. You 
speak of the design of creation, — of the design of redemption • 
— but what have these two designs to do with the institution 
of the Blessed Sacrament ? the transubstantiation of Christ 
upon the altar ? It has this : The first design of creation 
was intended by the Almighty God to be, that man, preserv- 
ing the graces in which he was created, — preserving the image 
ii. which he was made, — should remain faithful to God, free 
from sin, the conqueror of his own passions, and of every 
temptation that could come upon him ; and so, living in the 
light of purity, in the fervor of love, in the strength of free- 
dom, that he might journey on through happiness and peace 
upon the earth, until he attained to the fulfilment of his per- 
fection, and laid hold of the eternal crown of glory. This 
was the design of God. This was marred by sin. Man sin- 
ned ; and the design of God could no longer be fulfilled ; he 
let evil into his soul ; he destroyed the integrity of his nature ; 
he violated the virginity of his existence ; he came to the 
knowledge of evil ; and, with the knowledge, he came to the 
love of evil. Understand this well ; it is a deep thought ; it 
enters into the designs of God. Every individual man born 
into this world was born a sinner. Defilement was upon him : 
the seeds of future evil were in him. All that was necessary 
for him was to let that infant grow into a youth ; and by 
necessity, he became an individual sinner, because the root 
of evil was in him. The seeds of corruption were implanted 
in him ; his blood was impure and defiled. All that was 
necessary was the dawn of reason and the awakening of pas- 
sion. The former made him an infidel ; the latter made him 
a debauched, licentious and impure sinner. This was the con- 
sequence of Adam's sin. Therefore, my dearly beloved, it 
was not only our nature that sinned in Adam, but every 
individual of our nature sinned in him ; save and except the 
Blessed Virgin Mary. Put her aside, and at once the whole 
race of human beings are individual sinners in Adam : — not 
personal sinners, but individual sinners. This, to be sure, 
is one of those things that people overlook. They do not 
understand that the curse of Adam came down to each and 
every one of us, — this sin of Adam, which was written upon 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



295 



our foreheads in characters of defilement. When it was a 
question of remedying that evil, it was necessary that the 
Almighty God should exercise His mercy individually upon 
each and every one of us. 

Two things, therefore, were tainted by the sin of Adam, — 
the nature and the individual. The nature, common to all, 
was tainted ; man's nature was broken ; man's nature was 
corrupted ; that which was common to us all, — the universal 
nature, — was defiled and injured by Adam's sin ; and in that 
defilement and injury every single individual child of Adam 
participated ; so that every one, personally and individually, 
was defiled in our first parent. Now, it follows from this, 
that when the Almighty God, in His second design of mercy, — 
namely the Redemption, — when he resolved to undo all the 
evil that Adam had done, — when He resolved to bind up and 
heal the wound that Adam had made, — it was necessary that 
God should take thought for the nature that was corrupted, 
and for the individuals that had fallen in Adam. If He had 
taken thought only for the nature, it would not be sufficient 
for us ; lor our nature may be restored, and, unless that 
restoring power came home to us, we, ourselves, may remain 
in our misery. God provided a remedy for the nature, — the 
universal nature. In the Incarnation He sent His own Divine 
son, who took our nature — our human nature : — who took a 
human body, a human soul, human feelings, a human heart, a 
human mind, human intellect, human will everything that 
belonged to the nature of man, Christ, our Lord took ; but 
he did not take the individual. Mark it well ! You Catho- 
lics ought to know the theology of your Divine religion- 
mark it well. Christ, our Lord, took everything that was in 
man except the individuality, — personality. That He did not 
touch. He took our nature, and absorbed it into His own 
person ; but He never took a human person. No man could 
say of our Lord, pointing to Him : " He is an individual 
man." No ! He was a divine man. When He spoke His 
words were those not of man, but of God ; because the per- 
son who spoke was Divine. If He suffered it was the suffer- 
ing not of man but of God ; because the person was Divine. 
This was necessary ; because, unless the Divine Person, — ■ 
that is to say God, — consented to suffer and to die, the sin 
of man's nature could never have been wiped out. When, 
therefore, the Eternal Father, in His love for mankind, sent 
His co-Eternal Son upon the earth, He, in that act of Incar- 
nation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, provided 
a remedy for the evil of Adam's nature ; for the human 



296 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



nature that was spoiled. Again I assert that Christ, our 
Lord, never took the human personality ; that He left the 
individuality of every man to himself ; that He did not take 
the individuality or personality of the man but only the 
nature. In order to remedy the nature it was necessary, in 
the designs of God, that God should unite Himself with "that 
nature. Mark this, — that God should unite Himself with 
man's nature was necessary in the designs of God, in order 
that man's nature might be purified and restored. Was this 
necessary to the designs of God ? Absolutely necessary. 
The Virgin Mary, — on that day in Nazareth, when Gabriel 
stood before her, — represented the human race. She repre- 
sented human nature, in her alone unfallen; and to that all- 
pure, and unfallen one, the Angel said : " Mary, a child shall 
be born to you, and he shall be called the Son of the Most 
High God." Mary paused; and until Mary, of her own free 
will answered : " Behold the handmaid of God ; be this 
thing done unto me according to Thy word :" until Mary 
said that word, the mystery of the Incarnation was sus- 
pended, and man's redemption was left hanging uj^on the 
will of one woman. But when Mary said the word, human 
nature, distinct from man's personality, was assumed by God. 
If Almighty God had not consented to unite Himself with 
our nature, that nature never could have been redeemed. 
But, thus we see that one great portion of Adam's evil was 
remedied in the Incarnation, — namely, that our nature was 
purified. 

But what about the individual ? It is not so much the 
purification of my nature — our common nature ; that does 
not so much concern me, I am an individual man, — the son 
of my mother ; I am a human person ; Christ, our Lord, had 
nothing to say to the human person in the Incarnation. 
How then am I, — a human person, — to enter into the graces 
and purity of God ? Oh, behold, my brethren, how the two 
previous designs culminate ! Christ, our Lord, multiplied 
Himself. Christ, our Lord, changed bread and wine into His 
own divine body and blood. Christ, our Lord, made Him- 
self present in the form of man's food. That food is broken. 
Every child that cries for that divine bread shall have it. 
That human individual, that personal creature is united to 
God, and the individual is sanctified as the nature was sanc- 
tified. The nature could not be redeemed or sanctified except 
by union with God; the individual is sanctified by the same 
means — union with God in the blessed Eucharist, Thus, 
then, we see how the design of creation — spoiled in Adam, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



297 



— spoiled not only in the nature, but in the individual, — is 
made perfect in Jesus Christ, as far as regards the mystery 
of the Incarnation. Well, therefore, He says: "Unless 
you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, 
you cannot have life in you." He was speaking to the indi- 
vidual. He did not say, " you cannot have life in your 
nature." He put life into human nature by taking that 
nature upon Himself. There was life there already, — life 
eternal, — in the person of Jesus Christ. But H^ was speak- 
ing to individuals ; and He said to them : " Unless you 
bring me home unto yourselves, individually, you cannot 
have life in you; for I am the life ; — life indeed; — life eternal, 
that came down from heaven ; and unless you eat of My 
flesh and drink of My blood you cannot have life in you. 
For if you do this, — if you eat of this flesh and drink of this 
blood, then you shall abide in Me and I in you." 

Behold, therefore, dearly beloved, how the mystery of the 
Incarnation, affecting, as it did, our nature, is brought home 
in its wonderful expansion to each human person in the 
Holy Communion. Oh, how sad and terrible — how dreadful 
is the thought that the devil has succeeded the second time 
in destroying our nature ! First he destroyed our nature in 
Adam ; so he succeeds in destroying the person in heresy, in 
Protestantism. He came and whispered, — " Christ is not in 
the Blessed Eucharist ! He is not there ! " He cut off— by 
that denial of Protestantism of the Real Presence — the last 
great design of God, in which the creation and the redemption 
were to be made perfect in their remedy and brought home to 
every individual man. Suppose, my children, that some 
dreadful epidemic came in among you, — some fearful eruption 
of Asiatic cholera : — that a sailor landed from a ship in New 
York, with the cholera, and from him it spread through the 
city ; — we would look upon that man as the origin of the 
evil, because he brought it, as Adam brought evil and sin 
and misery into this world. Then suppose some great phys- 
ician arose, — some mighty sage, — and said he held in his 
hand the great remedy : said to the whole city of New York 
— " Behold, I am come from a foreign land, where we have 
never known disease or complaint, with this sovereign remedy 
in my hand : no one that partakes of this shall ever suffer 
from this hideous disease." Would we not take the remedy 
out of his hands ? Would we not eat of that medicine, which 
is life out of death to us ? So Christ, our Lord, represents 
that great physician, coming with a sovereign remedy in His 
hand, and with that remedy we will remedy our nature in His 
13* 



298 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Incarnation. Then he says : "I am come from a foreign 
land that has never known disease or death. I came from 
Heaven. I bring the remedy against Adam's corruption and 
Adam's sin. I am the head of your nature, for I am one with 
you. So I say to you all : whoever wishes to escape this dire 
disease, must partake of this miraculous food. It is the self- 
same food brought down to elevate your nature, that is my 
own self." What would you think of a man that said : 
" Don't go near Him ! don't take that food from His hand I 
don't believe in Him ? " — thus clinging to disease and death. 
Why, you see clearly, my brethren, as we, Catholics, believe 
and know that the Almighty God has sufficiently revealed in 
His designs that it is absolutely necessary for every man who 
wishes to be saved and sanctified, to come into present con- 
tact with our Lord Jesus Christ, by opening his mouth and 
receiving the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the Lord 
in the Holy Communion. 

Such is the design of God. Now it remains for us to say 
whether that, which so completely fulfills the designs of God, 
fulfills also the wants of man. Oh ! my brethren, before we 
leave these designs, let us consider how magnificent they are. 
The Father loved man. First, in the beginning, when as 
God He loved His own image. What great love have you for 
the likeness of your own face in the looking-glass ? Every 
feature is there, every expression is there, but it is only an 
image. What love would a man have for his own portrait, 
even though designed by a master-hand ? Every tint and 
beauty of color may be there, every delicate trait most true to 
nature, and to the person represented. But, after all, it is 
only a piece of canvas, over-laid with a little paint skillfully 
arranged ; only an image. God, in the second design, 
beholds in man His own adorable and beloved Son : the Eter- 
nal Word, that from all eternity rested in the Father's bosom ; 
the very figure of His substance, and the splendor of His glory, 
equal to Him in all things, knowing and loving Him, and 
loved by Him with a substantial love, which is the third per- 
son of the Blessed Trinity — the Holy Ghost. He came down 
from Heaven, became man ; and the Eternal Father no longer 
looks upon man as a man would look upon his own picture, 
as an image. He looks down as a loving father of a family 
looks down on the face of his eldest son. How different the 
love of a man is for his own image, reflected in the mirror, or 
perpetuated by the painter's hand, cold, lifeless, inanimate, 
and his own image seen in every feature in every lineament 
of his child ; the child of his own manly love : the child grow- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



299 



ing and displaying every perfection, and returning the love 
of the father ; the child surrounding all the graces of ordinary 
infancy with a peculiar grace and shining beauty in his fath- 
er's eyes, until he draws every chord of that father's heart, 
entwining around him so closely, that if the child should die, 
or disappear, the father would seem to have lost every pur- 
pose of life, and be ready to lie down and die upon the gravo 
of his first-born ! So the Almighty and Eternal God, looking 
down in the second design of His redemption, beheld one who 
was not a human person, but His own Divine person ; not 
merely human, though truly human ; but man and God united. 
And that union consummated, not in man only, not in the 
human person, but in God the Divine person, and just as that 
image of Jesus Christ so captivated the Father's love, that 
twice He rent the Heavens miraculously, and sent down His 
voice, — once when Christ was standing in the Jordan ; and 
another time when He was transfigured on Mount Tabor. On 
both occasions, the miraculous voice — as if God could no lon- 
ger contain His love, — saying, " This is My beloved Son, in 
whom I am well pleased. Let all hear Him !" That image 
so captivated the Father's love that he wished to reproduce 
it in all the children of men, — that He wished to multiply it. 
It was so fair, so beautiful, that the Eternal Father, whenever 
He cast His eyes upon the earth, wished to see it multiplied in 
every man personally. He wished to see every man another 
Jesus Christ, His Son. He wished to be able to say to you, 
and to me, — " he is also my beloved child, in whom I am well 
pleased !" In order to do this, His Divine Son multiplied 
Himself, and remained upon earth, — broke, as it were, His 
existence, His perfect existence, His inseparable existence, — 
broke it ; separated it into a thousand forms ; became upon 
your lips and mine, and on those of the little child that comes 
up to this altar — the mere image of God, and receives the 
Holy Communion, goes down from this altar, and the Father 
of Heaven looks down and says : — "Behold My beloved 
Son Jesus Christ, is there !" The Angel guardian that 
conducts the child to the Altar, prostrates himself before 
the figure of that child as he returns from the Altar again. 
For now he is a human person ; but God is in him. 

And this is the supreme want of man. That which is the 
fulfilment of the Divine design is the supreme want. What 
is that we want Christian believers as you are ? — tell me your 
great want in this world ? Every man has his own wants 
and hopes and desires and purposes of life. What is it that 
you want ? What do we aspire to ? Tell me ? One man 



300 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



says : — " Weil, I hope to become a wealthy man ; to be the 
founder of a grand family in the land." Will your hopes 
stop here, my friend ? The grand family you found will fol- 
low you to the grave. Have you brought no hopes with you ? 
Another says : — " I hope to obtain some distinguished posi- 
tion, the first position in the land." I suppose you will be 
President of the United States. But the day will come when 
they will carry the President, and. consign him also, to his 
grave. What is your hope and mine? Oh, friends and 
brethren, is it not my hope to bring out in my soul here by 
grace, and hereafter by glory, the image of the Eternal God, 
which is stamped upon it ? My hope is to live in the light 
of Divine Grace, to walk in the beaming of Divine purity. 
My hope is to keep my will unfettered, that freely I may 
devote it to the service of my God. My hope is to rise by 
Divine help into all the majesty of Christian being. And the 
majesty and the glory of the Christian man lies here, — that 
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, may be brought out in him. No 
great one in Heaven, but the greatest of all — the Eternal God 
and man Jesus Christ, He stamped the God upon our human- 
ity in the Incarnation. He stamped the God upon our 
nature ; and that stamp He left on our nature ; and we must 
stamp it upon our person. And the true want of every Chris- 
tian man, and the true purpose of his existence, is to bring 
out the Christ that is in him, and to become a son of God. 
Nothing short of this. If we fail in this, then all our hopes 
perish from us. If we fail in this, it is in vain that we have 
achieved every other purpose of life ; it is in vain that we 
have written our names, even in letters of gold, upon the 
foremost page of our country's history ; it is in vain that we 
have left a name to other times, built up upon the solid foun- 
dation of every higher quality that is enshrined in the tem- 
ple of man's immortality. It is in vain that we have accumu- 
lated all the world's riches. If we fail to bring out the 
Christ that is in us, then we are, of all men, the most misera- 
ble ; because we have failed in realizing the only true ho~e, 
the only true want of the Christian man. What follows? 
Says the Saviour — " If a man gain the whole world," — the 
world's places, the world's honors — "and lose his own soul, 
what profiteth it him ? " And the loss of our souls is effected 
in man by neglecting to bring Christ out in us. For it is 
written — our vocation, our calling, our justification — that is 
to say, our sanctification — our alternate glory, — all depend 
upon one thing, — making ourselves, by Divine grace, con- t 
formable to Jesus Christ. For God foreknew and predestina- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



301 



ted that we might be made like to the image of J esus Christ : 
and "those whom He called He justified, and those whom 
He justified He loved." 

This being the want of man, how is it to be supplied ? Can 
man alone supply the want ? No ! There are three enemies 
that stand before us. Powerful and dreadful are each and 
every one of these enemies, saying to us — " I am come to 
destroy the Christ in you ! " The first of these is the world 
— the world with its evil maxims ; the world with its pride : 
with its avarice, with all its false ideas; the world with its news- 
papers and periodicals, with all its theories not stopping short 
of theorising upon God ; — the world that tells us this influence 
is elevating, although the Almighty God tells us it is not; 
and that mocking buffoonery of religion, dissolving the matri- 
monial tie, the most sacred of all bonds ; the world, flooded 
with impurity, evil examples, and its evil maxims and princi- 
ples, comes before the Christian man hoping to be made like 
unto Jesus Christ, and says : " I tell you you must not be a 
Christian. I will surround you by my influence ; I will beset 
you with evil examples ; I will pollute the moral atmosphere 
you live in with my false principles, and work the Christ 
out of yoa ! " Will any man be able, of bis own power, to 
resist this influence and conquer it? Ah! it has captivated 
and enslaved the best intellects of our age ; the grandest 
minds of our age have been utterly debauched by worldly 
principles ; for we know the very best intelligences of our 
age, at this moment, are writing the sheerest nonsense; — these 
men who write articles in the newspapers upon commercial 
subjects ; — these men whose wits are keen as a razor in philoso- 
phical speculation ; — quick to perceive a flaw in an argument; 
— when these men come to write about religion, — as you will 
see in looking at any of the leading newspapers of New York 
to-morrow morning, — what this man and that man said in the 
various conventicles and churches to-day ;— you will find a 
Quaker standing up, — a holy man, — humming, hawing, and 
rocking himself; lifting up his languid eyes to Heaven ; and 
then, after a long pause you will find him denying the Divin- 
ity of J esus Christ and declaring that He was not the Son of 
God at all ! This happened last Sunday in New York. Yoa 
will find another man coming out with the theory and the be- 
lief that man never fell ; and, therefore does not need any 
remedy. This — in the face of the moral and social corruption 
and guiltiness of our age, that is revolting to the eyes of God 
and man ! Thus it is the world surrounds the very best intel- 
lects, and the shrewdest and strongest minds. And do you 



3C2 



#HE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



expect to resist this ? ISTo ! You cannot do it. You must 
say with St. Paul : " Of myself I can do nothing ; but I can 



here for you and me. 

The next great enemy is the flesh ; — the domestic enemy. 
The blood in our veins, the passions and the senses of our 
bodies rise up against us, to enslave us, and say : " You must 
not become like to the Son of God ! The Son of God was 
infinite purity. I will not allow you to possess your soul in 
purity ! I will not allow you to develope the spiritual exis- 
tence that is within you ; you must follow the dictates of 
your passions ; you must become a drunkard, a licentious 
and impure man ! I will fill that eye with the flaming, lust- 
ful glances of desire ; I will make the absorbing desire for 
everything base throb in your veins, till it becomes a neces- 
sity of your nature." Thus says the flesh. Can we conquer 
it? The greatest and the grandest of earth's sons are the 
meanest slaves to their own passions. The grandest names 
upon the rolls of history, — the greatest heroes, — the greatest 
beings and the greatest philosophers — have all attached to 
them — when we turn the leaves of history and look at their 
lives — the foul stain of their impurity, running through their 
lives and covering all their existence with the vilest of all 
earthly passions. No ! We cannot conquer this flesh of 
ours, but in Him, — the Lord our God, — who of old bound up 
the demon and cast him forth into the desert of Ethiopia. So 
can we bind, with Him, these unruly passions, and stem the 
flood of desire in our corrupt and polluted natures, and deny 
ourselves for Him, who will enable, while He commands us 
to do it ; and to cast forth the demon into the outer 
world that is so fitted for him. 

Finally comes the pride of life, the third enemy. Ambi- 
tion, the self-reliance, the pride of man, the pride that 
refuses to be dictated to. "Why" — that pride says — 
" why should I submit to the commands of religion. 
Why it tells me I should go like a little child and 

frepare myself and go to confession! Why it tells me 
should go through these devotions that are only fit for 
women and nuns ! Why should I fast and suffer hunger? I 
have all things around me. Don't I find such and such texts 
in Scripture that tell me 'All things are good?' Why shall 
I abstain from anything ? Why should I not have my own 
way, and reject all authority, human and Divine? and, first 
of all, the law that man must bear the obedience, humility 
and mortification of Jesus Christ in him if he would ba 



do all things in Him." 




He is 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



30$ 



saved?" Will you be able to contend against this pride? 
this pride that carries away the best and highest of earth's 
children? No! You will never be able to contend against 
it, to keep the humility of your intellect, the fidelity of your 
faith, unless you feed upon Him who is the source of alj 
virtue and all life. And thus, it is only by the same means 
that Christ has brought forth in man in the Incarnation, — 
by God uniting Himself in our nature with Christ, — that he 
is united with us in the Holy Communion. Therefore, it 
accomplishes at once all the designs of God. 

I have done my duty. I have finished my theme. Noth- 
ing remains for me but to remind the Catholics who are 
here, — the Catholics of this city, — the Catholic men who were 
nourished in the Catholic faith and derived that faith from, 
Catholic — and many among them from Irish — mothers, — to 
remind you that, for three hundred years of persecution and 
death, it was the Holy Communion, and Ireland's devotion to 
it, that kept the faith alive in our fathers. They resisted that 
pride of life. The world came and declared to them that 
they should give up their faith. They said no, against the 
whole world. They kept their faith through Jesus Christ, in> 
the Holy Communion. They resisted their passions and 
restrained them ; so that Ireland's purity, in the purity of< 
her daughters and the manliness of her sons — (a virtue that 
always accompanies personal purity and purity of race), was 
unexcelled. They resisted even when titles and honors were 
ready to be showered upon them. And when high intellect- 
was challenged to disprove the faith in which they believed, 
they bowed down before their time-honored altars ; and Ire- 
land's faith in her religion was never stronger than in the 
days when she suffered most for it. I say to you, Catholics 
$f New York, that no man can be saved from the flesh within? 
and the Devil that is beneath him unless Jesus Christ lead 
him. I tell you, Catholics of New York, — men of New 
York, who only go once a year to Holy Communion — that it 
would be almost better for you if you did not know the 
truth. If you want to know the explanation of your sins,— - 
of the drunkenness around you, — of the impurity and savage: 
assaults committed; of all the other quick, hasty crimes of 
which our Irish nature is more capable than of the meaner 
and more corrupt crimes, — the reason of it all is this, — tha$ 
you are not frequent and fervent communicants. If you ask 
me for a rule, I find, although I go to Communion every day 
of my life, I have enough to do still to conquer my spiritual 
eaemies. And, if I, a priest, have enough to contend with tq 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



"be saved after receiving the Holy Communion every morn- 
ing, — how can you be saved ? If you ask me for a rule I will 
give it in a few words. I believe every man who wishes to 
have the peace of Christ, and join in His Christian holiness, 
and have Christ brought forth in him, — that man should be, 
at least, a monthly communicant. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Friday even- 
ing, May '61, in the Academy of Music, New York, — proceeds to be 
devoted to the benefit of the Dominican Order.] 

" THE NATIONAL MUSIC OF IRELAND." 



Ladies and Gentlemen : The subject on which I propose 
to address you this evening is already, I am sure, sufficiently 
suggested to you by the beautiful Harp that stands before 
me (applause). The subject of the lecture is the National 
music of Ireland and the Bards of Ireland, as recorded in the 
history of the nation. I have chosen this subject, my dear 
friends, whereon to address you, and if you ask me why 
• — knowing that it was to be my privilege to address an au- 
dience mostly of my fellow-countrymen, I thought I could 
find no theme on which, as an Irishman, to address my fel- 
low-countrymen more fitting than that of music (applause). 
I remember that among the grandest and most ancient titles 
that history gives to Ireland there was the singular title of 
" The Island of Song." I remember that Ireland alone, 
among all the nations of the earth, has, for her national 
emblem, a musical instrument. When other nations stand 
in the battle-field, in the hour of national effort and national 
triumph ; — when other nations celebrate their victories ; — 
when they unfold the national banner, we behold there the 
lion, or some emblem of power ; the Cross, or some emblem 
of faith; the stars, — as in the "Star Spangled Banner" of 
America — an emblem of rising hope (loud cheers ); but it is 
only in the bygone days, when Ireland had a national stand- 
ard, and upheld it gloriously on the battle-field — it was only 
then that Ireland unfolded that national standard, which, 
floating out upon the breezes of Heaven, displayed, embodied 
in that " banner of green," the golden Harp of Erin. What 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



30& 



yonder then that, when I would choose a subject, pleasing to 
you and to me, — something calculated to stir all those secret 
emotions of national life and historical glory which are still 
our inheritance though we are a conquered people, — that I 
should have chosen the subject of our national music (cheers). 
But, first of all, my friends, when we analyze the nature of 
man, we find that he is a being made up of a body and a 
bouI ; that is to say there are two distinct elements of nature 
which unite in man. There is the body — perishable — mate- 
rial — gross * there is the soul — spiritual — angelic, and coming 
to us from Heaven. For, when the Creator made man, He 
formed, indeed, his body from out of the slime of the earth ; 
but He breathed, from His own divine lips, the vital spark, 
and set upon his soul the sign of divine resemblance to Him- 
self. The soul of man is the seat of thought ; — it is the seat 
of affection ; — it is the seat of all the higher spiritual and 
pure emotions. But, grand as this soul is — magnificent in 
its nature, in its origin, in its ultimate destiny, — it is so uni- 
ted to the body of man, that, without the evidence of the 
senses of the body, the soul can receive no idea, nor the spirit 
throb to any high or spiritual emotion. The soul, therefore, 
dwelling within us, is ever waiting as it were to receive the 
sensations that the five bodily senses convey to it. All its 
pleasure or its pain, its sorrow or its joy, — all must come 
through the evidence of these senses. The eye looks upon 
something pleasant — upon these beautiful flowers of nature's 
loveliness ; — and the pleasure that the eye receives passes to 
the soul, and creates the emotion of the feeling of pleasure in 
the body, for a thing of beauty, and, in the soul, of gratitude 
to the Lord God who gave it. 

Among all these senses of the body — although the eye be 
the master, as St. Augustine tells us, still the sensations 
which the soul receives through the ear — the sense of hear- 
ing — are the highest, most innocent and spiritual of all. The 
evidence of the eye seems to appeal more directly to the 
intelligence of the mind ; it stirs us up to think ; it 
seldom calls up the strong, passionate, instantaneous emo- 
tion ; but it stirs up the mind to think and consider. The 
ear, on the other hand, seems to bring its testimony more 
directly to the spirit, — to the seat of the affections in man. 
The sense of hearing appeals more to the heart than to the 
mind. Hence it is that, although " faith comes by hearing," 
and faith is the act of the intellect, bowing down before that 
great truth which it apprehends through the sense of hear- 
ing, and at the sound of the preacher's voice — it is still the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



medium through which that faith is received into the souL 
Thus, the Church of God has always recognized, and from 
the earliest ages has striven, by the sweet strains of her sacred 
music, to move the affections of man towards God (applause). 
But, in the truth, has it not been from the beginning thus, — 
that men have always been accustomed to express their emo- 
tions of joy or of sorrow to the sound of song? Our first 
parent had not yet quitted this earth, — this earth, which was 
made so miserable by his sin, — until his eyes beheld, among 
the descendants of Cain, a man named Tubal, " who was the 
father of those who play upon organs and musical instru- 
ments." It was fitting and harmonious that the first musi- 
cian the world ever beheld should have been a child of the 
reprobate and murderer, Cain. Almighty God permitted 
that music should start from out the children of the most 
unhappy of men. No doubt they sought, by the sweet 
strains of melody, to lighten the burden that pressed upon 
the heart and spirit of their most unhappy father. No doubt 
they tried in the same strains of sweet melody to give vent 
to their own sorrows or to lighten the burden of their grief 
and despair, by expressing it in the language of song. For, 
bo it is in the nature of man. The little babe in its mother's 
arms expresses its sense of pain by the wail of sorrow ; and 
expresses its meaning so well, when the mother sees her 
child's lips open and emit the loud, articulate cry of joy, 
.and she knows that the mysterious sunshine of delight and 
pleasure is beaming upon the soul of her child. The mother 
herself may have never sung until the voice of nature is 
awakened within her when first she bears her first-born in 
her arms. Then she learns the lay that soothes it to sleep : — 

" The mother taught by nature's hand. 

Her child, when weeping, will lull to sleeping 

With the tender songs of her native land." 

(Applause). That music, — the natural melody of music, — 
has a powerful influence upon the soul of man, I need not tell 
you. There is not one among us who has not experienced, at 
some time or other, in listening to the strains of sweet melody 
— the strains of song, the sensation either of joy increased, or 
sorrow soothed, in his soul. Thus, of old, when Saul, the 
King of Israel, abandoned his God, and an evil spirit came 
upon him, from time to time shadowing and clouding his mind 
with despair, bringing to him the frenzy of ungovernable sor- 
row, — then his skilful men sought and brought him the youth 
David ; and he sat in the presence of the king ; and when the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



307 



spirit came upon Saul and troubled him, David took his harp 
and played upon it : and the spirit departed, and the king 
was calmed, and his mighty sorrow passed away. So in like 
manner, when the people of old would express their joy or 
exulation before the Lord God, as in the day when the glori- 
ous temple of Jerusalem was opened and one hundred and 
twenty priests came and stood before all the people, and from 
brazen trumpets, sent forth the voice of melody ; and the 
house of the Lord was filled with music, and every heart was 
gladdened, and all Israel lifted up its voice in song and unison 
with their royal Prophet King as he played upon his harp of 
gold (applause). Thus it is that among the various senses, 
and their evidences, the sense of hearing, through music, is 
that which seems most directly and immediately to touch the 
heart and the spirit of man. It is the most spiritual in itself 
of all the senses. The object that meets the eye is something 
tangible, substantial — material. The object that appeals to the 
taste is something gross and material. The thing that presents 
itself to the senses, through the touch, must be palpable and 
material. But what is it that the sense of hearing presents 
to the soul. It is an almost imperceptible wave of sound, . 
acting upon a delicate membrane, — a fibre the most delicate in 
the human body, — the drum of the ear, — which is affected by 
the vibration of the air carrying the sound on its invisible 
wings. And thus it comes — a spiritual breath, through the 
most spiritual and soul-like of all the senses, and of all the 
evidence those senses bring to the soul of man. 

The effect of music upon the memory is simply magical: 
Have you ever, my friends, tested it ? Is there anything in 
this world that so acts upon our memory as the sound of the 
old familiar song that we may "not have heard for years. 
We heard it, perhaps, in some lonely glen, in dear old Ire- 
land, let us say (applause.) We have been familiar from our 
youth with the sound of that ancient melody, as the man 
sang it following his horses, ploughing the field ; as the old 
mother murmured it, as she rocked the child; as the milk- 
maid chanted it as she milked the cows in the evening ; it is 
one of the traditions of our young hearts, and of our young 
senses. Then, when we leave the green land, and go out 
among strange people, we hear strange words and strange 
music. The songs of our native land for a moment are for- 
gotten, until, upon a day, perhaps, as we are passing, that 
air, or old song, is sung again. Oh, in an instant, that magic 
power in the sound of the old, familiar notes throngs the halls 
of the memory with the dead. They rise out of their graves, 



308 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the friends of our youth, the parents, and the aged ones whom 
we loved and revered. Our lirst love rises out of her grave, 
in all the freshness of her beauty. So they throng the halls 
of memory the ones we may have loved in the past, with the 
friends whom we expected never to think of again (ajplause). 
Well does the poet describe it when he says — 

" When through life unblest we rove, 

Losing all that made life dear, 
Should some notes we us'd to love, 

In days of boyhood, meet our ear ; 
Oh ! how welcome breathes the strain, 

Wak'ning thoughts that long have slept— 
Kindling former smiles again 

In faded eyes' that long have wept. 

" Like the gale that sighs along 

Beds of oriental- flowers, 
Is the grateful breatli of song, 

That once was heard in happier hours. 
Fill'd with balm the gale sighs on, 

Though the flowers have sunk in death ; 
So when pleasure's dream is gone, 

It's memory lives in Music's breath. 

" Music ! — oh ! how faint, how weak, 

Language fades before thy spell ! 
Why should feeling ever speak, 

When thou canst breathe her soul so well ? 
Friendship's balmy words may feign. 

Love's are ev'n more false than they ; 
Oh ! 'tis only Music's strain 

Can sweetly soothe, and not betray. 

"No words of mine can exaggerate the power that music has 
over the soul of man. When the glorious sons of St. Ignatius, 
■ — the magnificent Jesuits (applause,) — went down to evan- 
gelize South America, — to evangelize the native Indians, — 
the hostile tribes lined the river bank ; the savage chieftains 
and warriors, in their war-paint and dress, stood ready to send 
their poisoned arrows through the hearts of these men. They 
would not listen to them, or open their minds to their 
'influence, until, at length, one of these heroic Jesuit Mission- 
aries, who were in the boat, took a musical instrument and 
began to play one of the old sacred melodies, and the others 
lifted up their voices and sang ; sweetly and melodiously 
they sang, voice dropping in alter voice, singing the praises 
of Jesus and Mary. The woods resounded to their peaceful 
chants; the very birds upon the trees hushed their songs 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



309 



that they might hear ; and the savages threw down their 
arms and rushed, weaponless, into the river, following after 
the boats, listening, with captive hearts, to the music. Thus 
upon the sound of song did the light of divine grace and of faith 
and Christianity reach the savage breasts of these Indians 
(applause). What shall we say of the power of music in stirring 
up all the nobler emotions of man ? The soldier arrives after his 
forced march, tired upon the battle-field. He hopes for a few 
hours rest before he is called upon to put forth all his strength. 
The bugle sounds in the morning, and this poor and unrested 
man is obliged to stand to his arms all day, and face death in a 
thousand forms. The tug of war lasts the whole day long. 
Now retreating, now advancing, every nerve is braced up, 
every motion excited in him, until at length, nature appears 
to yield, and the tired warrior seems unable to wield his 
sword another hour. But the national music strikes up ; the 
bugle and the trumpets send forth their sounds in some grand 
national strain ! Then with the clash of the cymbal all the fire is 
aroused in the man. Drooping, fainting, perhaps wounded as 
he is, he springs to his arms again. Every nobler emotion 
of valor and patriotism is raised within him ; to the sound of 
this music, to the inspiration of this national song, he rushes 
to the front of the battle, and sweeps his enemy from the 
field (great applause). Thus when we consider the nature of 
music, the philosophy of music, do we find that it is of all 
other appeals to the senses the most spiritual, — that it is of 
all other appeals to the soul the most powerful, that it 
operates not as much by the mode of reflection as in exciting 
the memory and the imagination, causing the spirit of 
the affections of men to rise to nobler efforts and to thrill 
with sublime emotions and influences. And, therefore, I say 
it is, of all other sciences, the most noble and the most 
god-like, and the grandest that can be cultivated by man 
on this earth (applause). 

And, now, as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. 
As the individual expresses his sense of pain by the discordant 
cry \\ hich he utters ; as the individual expresses the joy of 
his soul by the clear voice of natural music ; so, alsc, every 
nation has its own tradition of music, and its own national 
melody and song. Wherever we find a nation with a clear, 
distinct, sweet and emphatic tradition of national music, com- 
ing down from sire to son, from generation to generation, from 
the remotest centuries, — there have we evidence of a people 
strong in character, well marked in their national disposition 
—there have we evidence of a most ancient civilization. But 



310 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



wherever on the other hand you find a people light and frivol 
ous, — not capable of deep emotions in religion, — not deeply 
interested in their native land, and painfully affected by her 
present state, — a people easily losing their nationality or 
national feeling, and easily mingling with strangers and amal- 
gamating with them, — there you will be sure to find a people 
with scarcely any tradition of national melody that would 
deserve to be classed among the songs of a nation (applause). 
Now, among these nations, Ireland, — that most ancient and 
holy island in the Western sea, — claims, and deservedly, upon 
the record of history, the first and grandest preeminence 
among all people (prolonged applause). I do not deny to 
other nations high musical excellence. I will not even say 
that in this, our day, we are not surpassed by the music of 
Germany, by the music of Italy, or the music of England. 
Germany, for purity of style, for depth of expression, for the 
argument of song, surpasses all the nations to-day (applause). 
Italy is acknowledged to be the queen of that lighter, more 
pleasing, sparkling, and to me more pleasant style of music. 
In her own style of music England is supposed to be superior to 
Italy, and, perhaps, equal to Germany. But great as are the 
musical attainments of these great peoples, there is not one of 
these nations, or any other nation, that can point back to such 
a national melody, to such a body of national music as the 
Irish (great applause). Remember that I am not speaking 
now of the labored composition of some great master ; I am 
not speaking now of a wonderful Mass, written by one man ; 
or a great oratorio, written by another ; — works that appeal 
to the ear refined and attuned by education ; — works that 
delight the critic. I am speaking of the song that lives in 
the hearts and voices of all the people — I am speaking of the 
national songs you will hear from the husbandman, in the 
field, following the plow ; from the old woman singing to the 
infant on her knee; from the milkmaid, coming from the 
milking ; from the shoemaker at his work, or the blacksmith 
at the forge, while he is shoeing the horse [applause]. This 
is the true song of the nation : — this is the true national mel- 
ody that is handed down, in a kind of traditional way, from 
the remotest ages ; until in the more civilized and cultivated 
time, it is interpreted into written music ; and then the world 
discovers, for the first time, a most beautiful melody in the 
music that has been murmured in the glens and mountain 
valleys of the country for hundreds and thousands of years. 

Italy has no such song. Great as the Italians are, as 
masters, they have no popularly received tradition of music> 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



311 



The Italian peasant [I have lived among them for years]— 
the Italian peasant, while working in the vineyard, has no 
music except two or three high notes of a most melancholy 
character, commencing upon a high dominant and ending in a 
semitone, producing an effect something between the humming 
of a bee and the praying of another animal which I will not 
mention (laughter). The peasants of Tuscany and of Campag- 
na, when, alter their day's work, they meet in the summer 
evenings, to have a dance, have no music ; only a girl takes a 
tambourine, and beats upon it, marking time ; and they dance 
to that ; but they have no music. So with other countries. 
But go to Ireland ; listen to the old woman as she rocks her- 
self in her chair, and pulls down the hank of flax for the spin- 
ning ; listen to the girl coming home from the field with the 
can of milk on her head ; and what do you hear ? — the most 
magnificent melody of music. Go the country merry-makings 
and you will be sure to find the old fiddler, or white headed 
piper an infinite source of the brightest and most sparkling 
music (applause). 

How are we to account for this ? We must seek the 
cause of it in the remotest history. It is a historical fact that 
the maritime or sea-coast people of the North and West of 
Europe were, from time immemorial, addicted to song. We 
know for instance, that in the remotest ages, the Kings of our 
sea-girt island, when they went forth upon their warlike 
forays, were always accompanied by their harper, or minstrel, 
who animated them to deeds of heroic bravery. Even when 
the Danes came sweeping down in their galleys upon the 
Irish coast, high in the prow of every war-boat sat the scald, 
or poet, — yellow-haired, heroic, wrinkled with time ; — the his- 
torian of all their national wisdom and their national prowess. 
And when they approached their enemy, sweeping with 
their long arms, through the waves he rose in the hour 
of battle, and poured forth his soul in song, and fired every 
warrior to the highest and most heroic deeds. Thus it was 
in Ireland Avhen Nial of the Nine Hostages swept down upon 
the coast of France ; and took St. Patrick (then a youth) 
prisoner ; the first sounds that greeted the captive's ear were 
the strains of our old Irish harper, celebrating in a langauge 
he then knew not, the glories and victories of heroes long 
departed (applause). 

Now, it was Ireland's fortune that the sons of Milesius 
came and settled there. They came from Spain in the earli- 
est ages, and they brought with them a tradition of civiliza- 
tion, of law and of national melody. They established a sys- 



312 



TUE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



tern of jurisprudence, established the reign of law of empire, 
and of national government in the land ; they made Ireland 
a nation governed by Kings recognizing her constitution 
and laws — governed by an elective constitutional monarchy. 
Assembled thus, they met in the lofty and heroic halls of 
ancient Tara. There our ancient history tells us that, after the 
king who sat upon his throne, the very first places among the 
princes of the royal family were given to the bards. They 
were the historians of the country. They wrote the history 
of the nation in their heroic verse, and proclaimed that his- 
tory in their melodious song ; they were the priests of that 
ancient form of paganism, that ancient and mysterious form 
of Druidical worship which found its inspiration in the 
charm of melody. And so they popularized their false gods, 
by appealing to the nation's heart, through song. They were 
the favorite counsellors of the kings ; they were the most 
learned men in the land ; they knew all the national tradi- 
tions, and all the nation's resources : and, therefore, if a war 
was to be planned, or an alliance to be formed, or a treaty to 
be made, the bards were called into the council ; it was their 
wise counsel that guided and formed the national purposes. 
They accompanied the warrior-king to the field of battle ; 
and that warrior-king's highest hope was that, in returning 
triumphant from the field of his glory, his name might be im- 
mortalized among his fellow-men, and enthroned in the fame of 
the bardic song ; and that even if he was borne back dead upon 
his shield, from the field of battle, his name would be perpet- 
uated, and his fame would live on in the hearts and minds 
of his countrymen, enshrined in the glories of National song 
(applause). Hence it is, that from the earliest date of Irish 
history, — long before the light of Christianity beamed upon 
us, — the bards were the greatest men in the land. The min- 
strels of Erin filled the land with the sound of their song ; 
and the very atmosphere of Ireland was impregnated with 
music. The hour is yet near when God gave to our native 
land, its highest gift, namely, a truly poetic child. When 
Ireland's poet came to find fame and immortality in Ireland, 
nothing was left to him, nothing required of him, but take 
these ancient melodies floating in the land, to interpret the 
Celtic in which they were found, into the language of to-day, 
and Tom Moore, Ireland's poet (great cheering), well might 
say, as he took Erin's harp in his hand — 

" Dear Harp of my country ! in darkness I found thee ; 

The cold chain of silence had hung o'er thee long ; 
Where proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee 

And gave all thy chords to light, freedom and song. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



SIS 



The warm lay of love, and the light note of gladness, 

Have wakened thy fondest, thy liveliest thrill, 
But, so oft hast thou echoed the deep sigh of sadness, 
That e'en in thy mirth it will steal from thee still. 
u Dear Harp of my country ! farewell to thy numbers, 

This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine ! 
Go, sleep, with the sunshine of fame on thy slumbers, 
Till touched by some hand less unworthy than mine. 
If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover, 

Have throbb'd at our lay, 'tis thy glory alone, 
I was but as the wind, passing heedlessly over, 

And all the wild sweetness I waked was thine own. 

Yes ; Ireland's poet was a lover of his country, and was 
emitten with her glory; but finding that glory eclipsed in 
the present, he went back to seek it in the past, and found 
every ancient tradition of Erin's ancient greatness still living 
in the hearts of the people and the voice of their National 
song (applause). It was the music of Ireland, as it was the 
bards of Ireland that kept the nation's life-blood warm, even 
when that life-blood seemed to be flowing from every vein. 
It was the sympathy of Ireland's music, — the strong, tender 
sympathy of her bards, — that sustained the National spirit, 
even when all around seemed hopeless. The first great pas- 
sage in our history, as recorded by Ireland's poet, and by him 
attuned to a sweet ancient melody, describes the landing of 
the Milesians in Ireland. It was many centuries before 
Christianity beamed upon the land. An ancient Druidical 
prophecy foretold that the sons of a certain chief called 
Gadelius were to inherit a beautiful island in the West. 
This became a dream of hope to that family ; so, at last, 
they resolved to seek this island of " Innisfail." And, as the 
poet so beautifullv expresses it, — 

" They came from a land beyond the sea ; 

And now o'er the Western main, 
Set sail, in their good ships, gallantly, 

From the sunny land of Spain. 
f Oh ! where's the isle we've seen in dreams? 

Our destined home or grave," — 
Thus sung they as, by the morning's beams, 

They swept the Atlantic wave. 

'* And lo, where afar o'er ocean shines 

A sparkle of radiant green 
As though in that deep lay emerald mines, 
Whose light through the wave was seen. 
'Tis Innisfail ! — 'tis Innisfail !' 

Rings o'er the echoing sea 
While, bending to Heaven, the warriors hail 
The home of the brave and free." 
14 



314 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



For many years after their landing, the Milesians labored 
to make Ireland a great country ; and they succeeded. But 
the brightest light of all had not yet beamed upon us ; the 
light of Christianty was not yet upon the land. Yet many 
indications foretold its coming; and among others, there ia 
one, commemorated in ancient tradition and ancient song 
which the poet has rendered into the language of our day. 
"We are told that, years before Ireland became Catholic, the 
daughter of a certain king named Leara, or Lir, whose name was 
Fiounnala, was changed by some magic agency into the form 
of a swan ; and she was doomed to roam through the lakes 
and rivers of Ireland, until the time when the bell of Heaven 
should be heard ringing for the first Mass ; then the unhappy 
princess was to be restored to her natural shape. So the reas- 
oning bird sailed on, and she sang to the rivers and to the 
lakes a<nd to the cascades, the song ; — 

" Silent, Oh Moyle, be the roar of thy waters ; 

Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose ; 
While murmuring mournfully, Lir's lonely daughter 

Tells to die night star her tale of woes. 
When shall the swan, her death-note singing, 

Sleep with wings in darkness furPd ? 
When shall Heaven, its sweet bell ringing, 

Call my spirit from this stormy world ? 

" Sadly, Oh Moyle, to thy winter wave weeping, 

Faith bids me languish long ages away ; 
For still in her darkness does Erin lie sleeping ; 

Still doth the pure light its dawning delay. 
When shall the day-star, mildly springing, 

Warm our isle with peace and love ? 
When shall Heaven its sweet bell ringing, 

Call my spirit to the fields above." 

The light came ; and Patrick, the Catholic Bishop, stood 
upon Tara's height, to meet the intelligence, the music, and 
the mind of Ireland. The light came ; and Patrick, the Bish- 
op, stood with a voice ringing to words never heard before in 
the Celtic tongue, and to a music newly awakened in the land, 
with the Gospel of Christ upon his lips, and the green Sham- 
rock in his hand. And these wise Druids leaned upon their 
harps, listened and argue 1 until conviction seized upon them, 
and Dhubhac, the head of the bards, seized his harp and said : 
" Oh, ye Kings and men of Erin ! this man speaks the glory 
of the true God ; and this harp of mine shall never resound 
again save unto the praises of Patrick's God" (loud applause). 
Then all that was in Ireland, of intelligence, of affection, of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



315 



bravery, of energy, of talent, and of soul, rose up; they 
sprang to Patrick, clasped him to their hearts, and rose to the 
very height of Catholic and Christian perfection, with all the 
energy and the noble heart of the old Celtic Nation 
(applause). 

Then began three centuries of such glory as the world 
never beheld before or since. The whole island became an 
island of saints and sages. Monasteries and colleges crowned 
every hill and sanctified every valley ; and this era of music 
was long known and dearly loved, until the whole island 
became the monastic centre of Europe. Upon the rising 
heights of Mungret on the Shannon's banks, five hundred 
monks, all well-skilled in music, sang the praises of God. 
In Bangor in the county Down, thousands of Irish Monks 
established the custom of taking up the praise of God in suc- 
cessive choirs, — night and day, day and night ; — so that the 
voice of the singer, the notes of the harper, the sound of the 
organ were never for an instant silent in the glorious choirs 
of that ancient monastery. Then do we read, upon the testi- 
mony of one of our bitterest enemies, the English historian, Syl- 
vester Giraldus, commonly known as " Giraldus Cambrensis," 
that the Irish so excelled in music, that the Kings of Scot- 
land and Wales came thence to Ireland to look for harpers 
and minstrels to take back with them, to be the pride and 
honor of their courts. And the students who came from 
all the ends of the earth to study in the colleges and schools 
of Ireland, among other things, learned the music of the land, 
and went home to charm their parents and their fellow coun- 
trymen, in Germany, in France, in the North of Italy, with 
the strains and the splendid tradition of music that they had 
learned in the island that was the mother of song (applause). 

St. Columba, or Columkille, was the head of the bards in 
Ireland. At that time, so great was the honor in which the 
bards were held, that an Irish King bestowed the barony of 
Ross-Carberry, — a large estate, carrying with it titles of 
nobility, — upon a minstrel harper, in return for a glorious 
song. O how well must the 'bard have been honored ! how 
magnificently and grandly appreciated, when the Kings of 
the land sought to bestow their highest dignities upon the 
child of song. In this degenerate age, if a thing is worth 
scarcely anything, our phrase is " 'tis scarcely worth a song ! " 
But, fourteen hundred years ago, a song in Ireland, if it was 
well written, and set to original music, and the harper could 
skilfully sweep the chords of his lyre, and excite joy or 
pleasure in the heart of his monarch, — that harper received a 
crown of gold, broad lands and titles of nobility (applause). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



A few years later, we find that there were twelve hun- 
dred masters of the art of music in Ireland, and that King 
Hugh, of Ireland, was so much afraid of them, — of their 
influence with the people, beside which his own royalty 
seemed to be nothing, — so deeply was music loved by the 
people, — that he became jealous, and was about to pass a 
decree for the destruction of the minstrels wholesale ; when 
St. Columba, who was far away at Iona, hearing that his 
brother bards were about to be destroyed, hastened from his 
far northern island : and it is said that, as, in his remorse, he 
had made a vow never to look upon the green soil of his 
country again, he came blindfolded and blindfolded he went. 
He was a bard ; and he pleaded as a bard for his fellow- 
bards ; and he succeeded. And well it is said, that Ireland 
and Scotland may well be grateful to the founder of Iona, 
who saved the music which is now the brightest gem in the 
crown of both lands (applause). 

But the piety and the peace that shone upon the land by 
the glory of Ireland's virtue in these by-gone days were so 
manifest, that, as if they knew it but had no fear, the kings 
and the chieftains of the land resolved to test it. From the 
Northwest point of the island, a young maiden, radiant in 
beauty, alone and unprotected, covered with jewels, set out 
to travel throughout the whole length of the land. On the 
highway she trod any hour of the morning, mid-day, and the 
evening ; she penetrated through the centre of the island ; 
she crossed the Shannon ; she swept the Western coast, and 
came up again to the shores of Munster; she penetrated into 
the heart of royal Tipperary (great applause) ; she met her 
countrymen on every mile of her road ; — no man of Ireland 
even offended her by a fixed stare ; no man of Ireland 
addressed to her an imprudent word ; no hand of Ireland was 
put forth to take from her defenceless body one single gem 
or jewel that shone thereon ^prolonged and vehement ap- 
plause). The poet describes her as meeting a foreign knight, 
a stranger from a distant land, who came to behold the far- 
famed glory of Catholic Ireland : — 

" Rich and rare were the gems she wore, 
And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore; 
But, Oh ! her beauty was far beyond 
Her sparkling gems or snow-white wand. 

" Lady ! dost thou not fear to stray, 

So lone, and so lovely, along this bleak way? 

Are Erin's sons so good or so cold, 

As not to be tempted by woman or gold 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



317 



" ' Sir kniglit ! I feel not the least alarm, 
No son of Erin will offer me harm ; 
For though they love woman and golden store 
Sir knight ! they love honor and virtue more 1 1 

" On she went, and her maiden smile, 
Tn safety lighted her round the green isle ; 
And West for ever is she who relied 
On Erin's honor, and Erin's pride."' 

This vision of historic loveliness and glory was rudely 
shattered and broken by the Danish invasion at the end of 
the 8th century. The Danes landed on the coast of Wet 
ford; and the fate of the country was imperilled ; the piety 
of the country was threatened; the religion of the 
country almost extinguished ; and for three hundred 
years, the question was of national existence. In every 
field of the land, the blood of the people flowed like water. 
For instance, when the Danes and the Irish met in the county 
of Wicklow, they encountered each other in the "sweet Vale 
of Avoca." The battle began at six o'clock in the morning ; 
it lasted till nightfall. The rivers flowed red with blood : 
but, when the sun was setting, and the Irish standard of 
green, with the harp upon its folds, — then croio?ied, not 
crownless, as to-clay, — was flung out, the Gael were victo- 
rious, and six thousand dead bodies of the Danes covered the 
Vale of Avoca (applause). Something more glorious even 
than the tender reminiscences of our national poet is the 
recall of the victory which was gained there. He praises the 
Vale for its beauty : — 

" There is not in this wide world a valley so sweet 
As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet ; 
Oh ! the last rays of feeling and life must depart, 
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart." 

But it is not " the beauty that nature has shed o'er the 
ssene" that is its grandest reminiscence; it is the battle that 
mingled itself in that vale, which saw the glorious King 
Malachi the second, return victorious, wearing 

" The collar of gold. 
Which he won from the proud invader,'' 

— (applause) — that evening that saw the laurels of Avoca 
sprinkled with the red blood of the Danish foe (applause). 
For as the poet says,— 



318 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



" Less dear the laurel growing, 
Alive, untouch' cl and blowing, 

Than this whose braid 

Is pluck' d to shade 
The brows with victory glowing. 

11 We tread the land that bore us. 
Her green flag flutters o'er iiSj 

The friends we've tried 

Are by our side, 
And the fOe we hate before us." 

This was Ireland's cry on that glorious field (renewed 
applause). Yet, although the future was so grievously 
imperilled, — although so many interests were threatened with 
destruction, — yet Ireland during these three hundred years 
of Danish war kept her music. Her bards were in the battle- 
fields; and often the sound of the harp mingled with the 
cry of the combatants ; and often the hand that " smote 
down the Dane," like that of the glorious King who fell at 
Clontarf, — Brian Boroimhe, — was a hand that could not only 
draw the sword and wield it, but could sweep the harp, and 
bring forth from its chords of silver or of gold the genius 
and the tenderness of Irish song [applause]. But on the field 
of Clontarf, when Brian went forth to the battle, the chief of 
his bards, Mac Laig, who accompanied him to the field, and 
went before him as he reviewed his army, brought forth 
with trembling fingers, the spirit of the national music, and 
braced the arms of the hero. That minstrel had to take 
back with him the dead body of his aged and crownless 
monarch ; and he lifted up his voice in a song, the sweetest 
and most tender, yet most manly expression of the grief of the 
friend and servant, as he sat in the halls of Kincora, and 
filled it with his lamentation over the body of Ireland's great- 
est King [applause]. He told the nation to remember his 
glories, and the bards to fling out the name of Brian as the 
strongest argument of bravery. 

" Eemember the glories of Brian the Brave, 

Though the days of the hero are o'er, 
Though lost to Mononia, and cold in the gi-ave, 

He returns to Kincora no more. 
The star of the field, which so often hath poured 

Its beam o'er the battle is set; 
But enough of its glory remains on each sword, 

To light us to victory yet. 

"jVIononia ! when Nature embellish' d each tint 

Of thy flekls and thy mountains so fair. — 
Did she ever intend that a tyrant should print, 

The footstep of slavery there ? 
> No ! Freedom whose smile we shall never resign, 

Go, tell our invaders, the Danes, 
That 'tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine, 

Than to sleep but a moment in chains." 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



319 



Brian passed to Lis honored grave and to the immortality 
of his Irish human fame; and witk his lips upon the crucifix he 
sent forth his spirit to God. The unhappy year 1168 came, 
and brought with it the curse of Ireland in the first cause of 
the English invasion. Bear with me, ye maidens and 
mothers of Ireland, bear with me when I tell you that this 
curse was brought upon us by an Irishwoman; and I 
would not mention her save that in all history she is the only 
daughter of Ireland who ever fixed a stain on the white ban- 
ner of Erin [applause]. She was an Irish princess named 
Dearbhorgil, who was married to O'Ruark, Prince of Breffni, 
but eloped with Dermod MacMurchad, King of Leinster. 
O'Ruark, at the time, was absent on a religious pilgrimage 
of devotion. His return to his abandoned home, and his 
despair are commemorated in song. The whole nation was 
aroused, and the unhappy Dearbhorgil and her paramour, the 
King of Leinster, were banished from the Irish soil. Why? 
Because with her traditions of fame and glory, there was no 
room on the soil of Ireland for the adulterous man or for the 
faithless woman (tremendous applause). Thus driven forth, 
MacMurchad invoked the aid of Henry II. to reinstate him; 
and, in the year 1169, that monarch sent over an English, or 
rather a Norman army; they set foot upon Ireland; and there 
they are, unfortunately, to-day. From that hour to this., the' 
history of Ireland is written in tears and blood. On return- 1 
ing, his tho ights full of God, O'Ruark sees the towers of his 
castle rise before him. The poet thus describes his emo- 
tion: 

" The valley lay smiling before me, 

Where so lately I left lier behind ; 
Yet I trembled and something hung o'er me, 

That saddened the joy of my mind. 
I looked for the lamp, which she told me, 

Should shine when her pilgrim returned ; 
But, though darkness began to unfold me, 

No lamp from the battlements burned. 



" I flew to her chamber ; — 'twas lonely, 

As if the loved tenant lay dead ! 
Ah ! would it were death and death only I 

But no, the young false one had fled ! 
And there hung the lute that could soften 

My very worst pain into bliss, 
While the hand that had waked it so often 

Now throbbed to a proud rival's kiss. 



S20 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



" There was a time, falsest of women, 
When Breffni's good sword would have sought 

That man through a million of foemen 
Who dared but to wrong thee in thought I 

While now, — oh, degenerate daughter 
Of Erin, how fallen is thy fame ! 

Through ages of bondage and slaughter, 
Thy country shall bleed for thy shame. 

" Already the curse is upon her, 

And strangers her valleys profane, 
They come to divide, to dishonor, 

And tyrants they long will remain. 
But, onward ! the green banner rearing ; 

Go, flesh every sword to the hilt ; 
On our side is virtue and Erin, 

On theirs is the Saxon and guilt." 

The war, — the sacred war, — began. We know that for 
four hundred sad years that war was carried on with varying 
Buccess. In many a field was it well fought and well defended 
— this cause of Ireland's national independence* Many a man, 
glorious in her history, wrote his name upon its annals with 
the point of a sword dripping with Saxon blood (applause). 
Yet the cause was a losing one though not a lost one (pro- 
longed and enthusiastic applause). Well might Ireland's pat- 
riots weep when they saw diversion in the camp, diversion in 
the council ; — when they saw the brightest names in Ireland's 
history going to look for Norman honors, — to sink the proud 
names of O'Brien O'Niel, or O'Donnell in the vain title of the 
Earl of this, or the Earl of that. Well might the impassioned 
minstrel exclaim in the agony of the thought that, perhaps, 
Ireland was never more to be a nation — 

" Oh for the swords of former time ! 

Oh for the men who bore them, 
When armed for. right, they stood sublime, 

And tyrants crouch'd before them ; 
When pure yet, ere courts began 

With honors to enslave him, 
The noblest honors worn by man, 

Were those which virtue gave him." 

How fared it with those bards during this long protracted 
agony of national woe? They still animated the hopes of 
the nation : they still made their appeals to the Irish heart : 
they still made the pulse of the nation vibrate again to the 
vibration of their glorious harps. Spenser, the English poet 
jepioached them, because they sang only of love. Alas ! they 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION 



321 



had scarcely any other field. The time of national glory-- 
of national prosperity — was gone. They were the voice of 
an oppressed and down-trodden people; therefore did the 
Irish bard answer — 

" Oli ! blame not the bard, if lie fly to the bovvers 

Where pleasure lies carelessly smiling at fame ; 
He was born for much more, and, in happier hours, 

His soul might have burned with a holier flame. 
The string which now languishes loose o'er the lyre, 

Might have bent a proud bow to the warrior's dart ; 
And the lip which now breathes but the song of desire, 

Might have poured the full tide of a patriot's heart." 

Yes ; they did not content themselves, these bards, with 
merely animating the national purpose, and thrilling and 
rousing the national heart and courage. They did more. In 
the day of battle and danger, when they sounded the tocsin 
for the war and for the fight, then the bards that could have 
awakened, and did awaken, the tenderest strains of song, 
were foremost in the battle-field, fighting for Erin. It is 
more than an idle tradition that, which is embodied in the 
poet's verse — 

"The minstrel boy to the war has gone 

In the ranks of death you'll find him: 
His father's sword he has girded on, 

And his wild harp slung behind him. 
'Land of song,' cried the warrior bard, 

' Though all the world betrays thee, 
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, 

One faithful heart shall praise thee/ 

" The minstrel fell, but the foeman's chain, 

Could not bring his proud soul under, 
The harp he loved, ne'er spoke again, 

For he tore its chords asunder : 
And said, ' No chains shall sully thee, 

Thou soul of love and bravery ! 
Thy songs were made for the pure and free, 

They shall never sound in slavery.' " 

Three hundred years ago that mild and holy man whose 
name I have sometimes had occasion to mention before, at 
the sound of whose name rises before you the picture of a 
bloated, wallowing swine, with his blood shot, inflamed eyes, 
reeking with lust, and his hands clutching for a throat, to 
grasp a sufferer and extinguish a life ; and his huge frame 
scarcely able to move ;— well, his name is, Harry the VIIL 
14* 



322 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



(derisive laughter) : — one of the first laws that he made was, 
that every harper and every minstrel in Ireland should be 
put to death. It was so like him. He was so fond of killing 
people, — especially women (laughter). Every good-looking 
lady in England, in his time, was dreadfully afraid of him; 
and, if you wanted a lady to faint, or to put up her hands to 
see if her head was on her shoulders, you had only to say, " I 
hear the King is a great admirer of yours " (renewed laugh- 
ter). Then, and even before his time, from the day that the 
Norman invader first set foot on the soil of Ireland, — we have 
the testimony of history for it ; we have the decrees of the 
English monarchs for it, — the Irish bards and minstrels — Irish 
to their heart's core — were in the habit of coming into the 
English camp, and playing their national Irish airs. The 
English knew that these men were their enemies : they had 
orders from the king to slay any harper that came into the 
camp, because, they came only as spies, to find out the 
strength and disposition of their forces ; yet, oh ! glory of Ire- 
land ! so sweet was the performance of these men- — so melo- 
dious their music, that in spite of the royal decree, the 
English soldiers, officers, and generals, used to go out to look 
for these harpers and bring them into the camp (cheers). 
Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote a history of Ireland, — I 
don't say every word of it is a lie — but every sentence is a lie — 
(laughter) — even he was obliged to admit there was no such 
music heard in the world; — and coming down to the 18th 
century, the learned and accomplished Geminiani, who died 
in Dublin, in 1783, left in his history of music, these words : 
— " There is no original music in the West of Europe, except 
the Irish." Queen Elizabeth, following in the footsteps of her 
holy and accomplished father, imitating him in everything, 
even in her immaculate purity, resembling him perfectly, 
except, that while her father was corpulent as a whale, she 
was as thin as a herring (laughter), this Queen of England 
passed another law. She said, " We never can conquer Ire* 
land, and we can never make Ireland Protestant as long as the 
minstrels are there ;" and she passed a law that they were all 
to be hung ; and there was a certain lord in her court, with, 
I regret to say, an Irish title, my Lord B anymore, who prom- 
ised to do this, and was appointed, and took out a commis- 
sion to hang every man that was a harper. Why ? Because 
the same spirit by which the bard and minstrel had kept the 
nation up to its national contest, now turned its attention to 
the other element of discord, and thus the national war 
became a religious war, and the bard proved as Catholic, as 
he was Irish. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



323 



There are two ideas in the mind of every true Irishman. 

and these two ideas England never was able to root out of 
the land, nor out of the intellect, nor out of the hearts of the 
Irish people. And these two ideas are : — Ireland is a nation 
(great and prolonged applause). That is number one (re- 
newed cheers). Ireland is a Catholic nation ; and so will 
she remain (renewed applause). Plundered of our property, 
they made us poor. We preferred poverty rather than deny 
our religion and become renegades to God. Our schools 
were taken from us, and they thought they were reducing 
us thereby to a state of beastly ignorance. They made it a 
crime for an Irishman to teach his son how to read. Our 
religion kept us enlightened in spite of them. England never, 
never succeeded in affixing the stain of degradation and 
ignorance upon the Irish people. (A voice — "Nor never 
will." Cheers.) They robbed us of liberty as well as of 
property ; they robbed us of life ; they took the best of the 
land and slaughtered them ; they took the holy priests from 
the altars and slaughtered them. They took our Bishops, 
the glorious men of old, and slew them. When Ireton 
entered Limerick, he found O'Brien, the Bishop of Emly — a 
saint of God — found him there — where an Irish Bishop 
ought to be — in the midst of his people, rallying them to the 
fight, sending them into the breach again and again (great 
applause). They took O'Brien, the Irish Bishop, brought 
him into the open street, before his people, and they slaugh- 
tered him, as a butcher would slaughter a beast (sensation). 
They took Bishop O'Hurley, and brought him to Stephen's 
Green, in Dublin, and there tied him to a stake, and roasted 
him to death at a slow fire. They took 600 of my own brave 
brethren, — Dominicans, — brave, true men, Irishmen all. 
Oliver Cromwell, wherever you are to-night, I believe you 
have the blood of these 600 priests upon you — all except 
four! There were only four left! Think of this! They 
thought that when an Irishman was completely crushed, he 
ought to buy at least an acre of land, the land that belonged 
to him, or a morsel of bread to feed his family, by becoming 
a Protestant Irishman — men and women — declared that their 
religion and their faith was dearer to them than their lives 
(applause). The Irish peasant man — pure, strong, warlike, 
determined, high-minded, true to his God, true to his native 
land, true to his felloe -men, kneeled down before the ruined 
shrine of the Catholic Church, that he loved, and to that 
Church he said : — 



324 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION, 



" Through grief and through danger thy smile hath cheer'd my way, 

Till hope seemed to bad from each thorn that rouud me lay ; 

The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn'd, 

Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turned. 

I~es, slave as I was, in thine arms my spirit felt free. 

And bless'd even the sorrows, that made me more dear to thee. 

" Thy rival was honor'd. while thou wert wrong'd and scorn'd; 
Thy crown was of briars, while gold her brows adorn'd ; 
She woo'd me to temples, while thou lay'st hid in caves, 
Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas ! were slaves ; 
Yet cold in the earth, at thy feet, I would rather be, 
Than wed what I love not, or turn one thought from thee." 

This time England recognized in the Irish bards not only 
the enemies of her dominion, which would fain extinguish the 
nationality of Ireland, but still more the enemies of her re- 
formed Protestant religion which would rob Ireland of her 
ancient faith which she received from her Apostle. The bards, 
lived? on however. In spite of Henry VIII, in spite of Eliza- 
beth and in spite of my Lord Barry more, who took the con- 
tract as hangman to dispose of them, they lived on down to 
the time of Carolan ; and we have in a history of Scotland the 
testimony of a man who says that the Scotch, Welsh and Eng- 
lish, in the memory of living men in his time, used to go over 
to Ireland to study music. Handel, the great composer, one 
of the greatest giants of modern song, went over to London : 
he was coldly received. He went from England to stay in 
Dublin, where he was so warmly received, and found every 
note of his music so thoroughly appreciated, that he immedi- 
ately set to work and wrote that immortal work — the Oratorio 
of the Messiah, under the inspiration of an Irish welcome. 
This grandest of all modern pieces was first brought out in 
Dublin, before an Irish audience (applause). 

Carolan, the last of the bards, died but a few years before 
Moore was born. It seemed as if the last star in the firina- 
neiH of Ireland's bards had set. It seemed indeed as if 

" The harp that once through Tara's halls, 

The soul of music shed 
Now hung as mute on Tara's walls 

As if that soul were fled." 

But that star of Ireland's song, Tom Moore, greatest of Ire- 
land's modern poets, immortalized himself as well as the songs 
of his country in his famous Irish melodies. Where have you 
ever heard such simple, yet entrancing, melodies ? The greatest 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



325 



men among trie modern composers, though, they hold the palm 
of supremacy, yet this music has a melody of its own which 
cannot be equalled. Some of these melodies are as ancient as 
the earliest Christianity — as the air of " Eileen Aroon ; " so fair 
and beautiful is the melody of this that the immortal Mozart 
declared he would rather be the author of that simple melody 
than of all the works that ever came from his pen or from his 
mind. They are sung in every land. They are admired 
wherever the influence of music extends. They have softened 
— even in our own modern times they have softened and pre- 
pared the English mind to grant us Catholic Emancipation. 
Of course the most powerful motive, as experience has proved, 
was fear. That is the principal motive for any concession we 
receive from England (applause). But certain it is that the 
Irish songs and melodies of the old Irish bards popularized the 
Irish character in England, and enabled us the more easily tc 
gain that which was wrung from England's king and Eng- 
land, through the sympathy that was created by Moore's mel- 
odies. Hence it is that he himself expresses the anguish, yet 
the hope, of the bard — 

" But tho' glory be gone, and tlio' hope fade away, 
Thy name, loved Erin, shall live in his songs ; 
Not even in the hour when his heart is most gay, 
Can he lose the remembrance of thee and thy wrongs. 
The stranger shall hear thy lament o'er his plains ; 
The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o'er the deep, 
Till thy masters themselves, as they rivet thy chains, 
Shall pause at the song of their captive, and weep I" 

Music is the most spiritual of all human enjoyments. The 
pleasures of the taste are beastly ; the pleasures of the eye 
are dangerous : the pleasures of the ear, the delight of listen- 
ing to strains of sweet song, is at once the most entrancing 
and least dangerous of all the pleasures of sense. You may 
enjoy more of the pleasure of music without sensuality — it is 
scarcely capable of exciting any undue emotion of the heart 
or temptation of the mind. Nay more — we know from the 
Scriptures that music, that song, is the native language of 
Heaven, as it is the national language of man upon the earth. 
"VVe know that as music recalls the most vivid and tender 
recollections of earth, so that the dead start from their graves 
and throng once more the halls of memory at the sound of 
the well-known song, so also we know the joy of even the 
blessed angels of God is expressed in the language of divine 
and celestial song. It was a theory of old that the very 



326 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



spheres moved to a grand harmony of their own, whereupon 
our national bard sang — 

" Sing — sing — music was given 
To brighten the gay and kindle the loving ; 

Souls here, — like planets in Heaven, — 
By harmony's laws alone are kept moving." 

For that which is a simple theory of the spheres of the 
created firmament, is to be received as a reality when we 
regard the harmony of the divine sphere of Heaven. There 
the angels sing the praises of God, — there the air of Heaven 
is resonant with cries of joy — with the sweet concord of many 
sounds mingled with the angelic harpers upon their harps. 
Oh, let us hope that as we, as a nation, have the privilege 
among the nations to hold in our national melodies the sweet- 
est and tenderest strains of human song, so may we as chil- 
dren of that nation and land of song carry our taste with us 
into the field of the purest of melodies, and that those who 
sang best upon earth may sing best in the courts of God (ap- 
plause). In vain would Ireland's song be the brightest of all 
earthly melody unless that song were to be perpetuated in 
the mgner echoes and grander melodies of Heaven. Have 
we not reason to believe those bards and heroes who stood in 
the hour of battle and danger and difficulty for their home, 
and their national liberty for God and their native land, and 
died for it, have we not good reason to believe that these 
children of song have joined the higher and more celestial 
choir (applause). Yes, Ireland's minstrels sung the apostolic 
song, the virgin song from the lips of the holy St. Bridget, — 
the song of the holy, pure, stainless daughters of Erin, who 
are now, as in days past, our joy and glory ; their song 
was the sweetest on earth, and I have no doubt will be the 
sweetest in heaven — (applause). Let us, therefore, cling to the 
loved old land that made heroes of them, to the love of our 
old religion that made saints of them ; let us remember that 
every Irishman, all the world over, and every son of an Irish- 
man, and every grandson of an Irishman, — that he has that 
blood in his veins which brings to him the responsibility and 
the tradition of fifteen hundred years of national, as well as 
religious, glory (tremendous applause) ; — the responsibility 
through which our fathers from their graves appeal to us for 
God and for Erin ; the noblest, the best blood in which a pure 
nationality, always preserved and left distinct, is sanctified by 
the highest purity of an unchanged and unchanging faith 



\ 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 327 

(applause). That is the glory of every Irishman in the world, 
and it brings a responsibility ; for such a man is obliged, 
beyond all other men, to live up to these traditions, and 
show that he is no degenerate scion of such a race (applause). 

I have come here among you, and on my return to Ireland 
I will bear in my heart the joy, and on my lips the glad mes- 
sage, that you, my friends, are no degenerate sons of Ireland 
[applause]. I will bring home to cheer the saddened hearts 
at home — I will bring home to gladden the expectant hearts 
at home, the good and the manly and the glorious message 
that I have met thousands and thousands of Irishmen in Amer- 
ica ; but that, amid all the rising glories of their new coun- 
try, I have not met one who had forgotten his love or his affec- 
tion for the land of his birth [great applause]. If such a one 
there be, if such an Irishman be or exist, so. forgetful of the 
history, so dead to the glory of his native land, as to be 
ashamed of being an Irishman, — if such a man be in existence 
in this country — he has spared me the pain, the humiliation, 
and the disgust of showing himself [applause]. Now, my 
friends, I have only to thank you — as I do from my heart — 
for your presence here to-night. You know, that as far as I 
am personally concerned, I neither win nor lose in this world ; 
but I have the character and the sympathy of my Order upon 
me, and your presence here this evening is not a passing 
dream. You may forget it as long as you live ; but when you 
are dead and in your graves, there will be Irish priests at 
Irish altars breathing your name in prayer. And, if my 
words upon Irish music and Irish melody shall only succeed 
in putting you more in harmony with your own minds and 
hearts, and the neighbors around you, I shall consider I 
have done a great deal (cheers). 

And now, my friends, having invited your attention to 
the subject of Ireland's national music, let me wind up with 
one or two reflections similar to those with which I began. 
Irish song has played a large part not only in the strengthen- 
ing of Ireland's sons, but also in the conciliation of Ireland's 
most bitter enemies. Even as Moore made every true heart 
and every true and noble mind in the world melt into sorrow 
at the contemplation of Ireland's wrongs and the injustice 
that she suffered, as they came home to every sympathetic 
heart upon the wings of Ireland's ancient melody, yet he 
eaid to the harp of his country : 

" Go sleep with the sunshine of fame on thy slumbers, 
Till waked by some hand less unworthy than mine." 



328 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



A hand less unworthy came, a hand less unworthy than 
Thomas Moore's, a hand more loyal and true than even his 
was, when in Ireland's lays appeared the immortal Thomas 
Davis (applause). He and the men upon whom we built up 
our hopes for Young Ireland (great applause) — he, with them, 
seized the sad, silent harp of Erin, and sent forth another 
thrill in the invitation to the men of the Xorth to join hands 
with their Catholic brethren, — to the men of the South to 
remember the ancient glories of " Brian the Brave." To the 
men of Connaught, he seemed to call forth Roderick O'Conor 
from his grave at Clonmacnoise. He rallied Ireland in that 
year so memorable for its hopes and for the blighting of 
those hopes. He and the men of the Nation did what this 
world has never seen in the same space of time, by the sheer 
power of Irish genius, by the sheer strength of Young Ire- 
land's intellect ; the JSTation of '43 created a national poetry, a 
national literature, which no other country can equal. Under 
the magic voices and pens of these men, every ancient glory 
of Ireland stood forth again, I remember it well, I was but a 
boy at the time ; — but I remember with what startled enthu- 
siasm I would arise from reading "Davis' Poems;" and it 
would seem to me that before my young eyes I saw the dash 
of the Brigade at Fontenoy (tremendous cheers) ; — it would 
seem to me as if my young ears were filled with the shout 
that resounded at the Yellow Ford and Benburb, — the war- 
cry of the lied Hand, — as the English hosts were swept 
away, and, like snow under the beams of the rising sun, melted 
away before the Irish onset. The dream of the poet, — the 
aspiration of the true Irish heart, — is yet unfulfilled. But 
remember that there is something sacred in the poet's dream. 
The inspiration of genius is second only to the inspiration of 
religion. There is something sacred and infallible, — with all 
our human fallibility, — in the hope of a nation that has never 
allowed the hope of freedom to be extinguished (loud ap- 
plause). For many a long year, day and night, the sacred 
fire that was enkindled before St. Bridget's shrine, at Kil- 
dare, was fed and sent its pure flame up to heaven. The 
day came when that fire was extinguished. But the fire that 
has burned for nearly a thousand years upon the altar of 
Ireland's nationality, — fed with the people's hopes, fed with 
the people's prayers, — that fire has never been extinguished, 
even though torrents of the nation's blood were poured out 
upon it ; — that fire burns to-day; and that fire will yet illu- 
mine Ireland (tremendous applause). 

I will conclude with one word. Even as King Lir's 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



329 



lonely daughter, Fionnuala, sighed for the "beaming of the 
day-star, so do I sigh. When shall that day-star of freedom, 
mildly springing, light and warm our isle with peace and 
love ! When shall the bell of sacred liberty ringing, call 
every Irish heart from out the grave of slavery, — from out 
the long, miserable night of servitude, — to walk in the full 
blaze of our national freedom and our national glory 
(cheers). Oh! may it come. Oh, God! make our cause Thy 
cause ! I speak as a priest as well as an Irishman ; — I claim 
in my prayer, as well as in my words, — to that God to whom 
my people have been so faithful, — to give us not only that 
crown of eternity to which we look forward in the Christian's 
hope, — but oh ! to give us, in His justice, that crown of 
national liberty and glory to which we have established our 
right by so many ages of fidelity. (Enthusiastic cheering.) 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in St. Bridget's 
Church, Tompkin's Square, New York, on Thursday evening, June 6.] 

" THE IRISH PEOPLE IN THEIR RELATION TO CATHOLICITY." 

My Friends: The subject on which I have the honor to 
address you this evening is one of the most interesting that 
can occupy your attention or mine. It is " Christianity, or 
the Christian Religion as reflected in the National character 
of the Irish race and people." I say this subject is interest- 
ing, for nothing that can offer itself to the consideration of 
the thoughtful mind, or to the philosopher, can possibly be 
more interesting than the study of the character and the 
genius of a people. It is the grandest question of a human 
kind that could occupy the attention of a man. The whole 
race comes under a mental review ; the history of that race 
is to be ascertained; the antecedents of that people have to 
be studied in order to account for the national character, as 
it represents itself to-day among the nations of the earth ! 
Every nation, every people under Heaven has its own pecu- 
liar national character. The nation; the race is made up of 
thousands and millions of individual men and women. 
Whatever the individual is, that the nation is found to be in 
the aggregate. Whatever influences the individual was sub- 



330 



SHE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



jected to in forming his character, establishing a certain tone 
of thought, certain sympathies, antipathies, likings or dislik- 
ings: whatever, I say, forms the individual character in all 
these particulars, the same forms the nation and the race, 
because the nation is but an assemblage of individuals. 

Now, I ask you, among all the influences that can be 
brought to bear upon the individual man, to form his charac- 
ter ; to make him either good or bad ; to give tone to his 
thoughts ; to string his soul and to tune it ; to make him fly 
to God ; to produce all this which is called character, — is it 
not perfectly true that the most powerful influence of all is 
that man's religion ? It is not so much his education : for 
men may be equally educated, — one just as well as the other, 
■ — yet they may be different from each other as day from 
night. It is not so much his associations, for men may be in 
the same walk of life, men may be surrounded by the same 
circumstances of family, of antecedents, of wealth or poverty, 
as the case may be, yet may be as different as day and night. 
But when religion comes in and fills the mind with a certain 
knowledge, fills the soul with certain principles ; elevates the 
man to a recognition and acknowledgment of certain truths ; 
imposes upon him certain truths and in the nature of the 
most sacred of all obligations, namely, the obligation of eter- 
nal salvation ; — when this principle comes in, it immediately 
forms the man's character, determines what manner of man 
he shall be, gives a moral tone to the man's whole life. And 
so it is with nations. Among the influences that form a 
nation's character, — that give to a people the stamp of their 
national and original individuality, — the most potent of all 
is the nation's religion. If that religion be gloomy ; if it be a 
fatalistic doctrine, telling every man he was created to be 
damned, you at once induce upon the people or the nation 
that profess it a hang-dog, miserable, melancholy feeling that 
makes them go through life like some of our New England 
Calvinists, sniffling, and sighing, and lifting up tfieir eyes, 
telling everybody that if they look crooked, looking either to 
the right or the left, they will go to hell. You know the 
propensity of some people to be always damning one another 
(laughter). If, on the other hand, the religion be bright, if it 
open a glimpse of Heaven, founded upon an intellectual prin- 
ciple, if it springs up a man's hopes ; tells him in all his 
adversities and his misfortunes to look up ; gives him a 
glimpse that the God that made him is Avaiting to crown him 
with glory, you will have a bright, cheerful, brave, and cour- 
ageous people. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



331 



Now srw h a religion is the Christianity that Christ foun- 
ded upon this earth. I assert, that if that religion of Christ 
be a true religion, — as we know it to be, — that there is not 
upon this earth a race whose national character has been so 
thoroughly moulded and formed by that divine religion as 
the Irish race, to which I belong (applause). It is easy, my 
friends, to make assertions ; it is not so easy to prove them, 
I am not come here to-night to flatter you, or to make crude 
assertions ; but I am come here to lay down the principle 
which is just enunciated, and to prove it. 

What is the Christian character ? What character does 
Christianity form in a man ? What does it make of a man ? 
Men are born into this world more or less alike. It is true 
that the Chinaman has no bridge to his nose, and that his 
eyes turn up, both occupied watching where the bridge 
ought to be (laughter) ; but that is an immaterial thing. 
Intellectually, and even morally, all men are mostly born 
alike. The world takes them in hand, and turns out a cer- 
tain class of men equal to its own requirements, and tries to 
make him everything that the world wants him to be. God 
also takes him in hand. God makes him to be not only what 
the world expects of him, but also what God and heaven 
expect of him. That is the difference between the two classes 
of men. The man whose character is mostly worldly, — who 
is not a Christian, — and the man whose character is formed 
by the Divine religion of Christ. What does the world 
expect and try to make of the child? Well, it will try to 
make him an honest man : and this is a good thing ; the 
world says, it is " the noblest work of God." Without going 
so far as to say this, I say that an honest man is very nearly 
the noblest work of God. The man who is equal to all his 
engagements ; the man who is not a thief or a robber (the 
world does not like that); the man who is commercially hon- 
est and fair in his dealings with his fellow-men — that is a 
valuable virtue. The world expects him to be an industri- 
ous man — a man who minds his business, and tries, as we 
say in Ireland, 11 to make a penny of money." That is a very 
good thing. I hope you will all attend to it. I will be glad- 
dened and delighted, — if ever I should come to America 
again, I will be overjoyed, to hear if any one comes to me 
and says in truth — " Why Father Burke, all these Irishmen 
you saw in New York, when you were here before, have 
become wealthy, and are at the top of the wheel." Nothing 
could give me more cheer. The world expects a man to be 
industrious and temperate ; because if a man is not indus- 



332 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



trious, is not temperate, he never goes ahead ; he does no 
good for his God, his country, or anybody. Therefore, this 
is also a good thing. 

But, when the world has made a truth-telling man an 
honest man, an industrious and a temperate man, the world 
is satisfied. The world says : " I have done enough: that is 
all I want." The man makes a fortune, the man establish-as 
a name, and the world at once — society around him — offer 
him the incense of their praise. They say — "There was a 
splendid man. He left his mark upon society." And they 
come together and put in a subscription to erect a statue for 
him in the Central Park. But they have not made a Chris- 
tian. All those are human virtues, — excellent and necessary. 
Doirt imagine that I want to say a word against them. 
They are necessary virtues. No man can be a true Christian 
unless he have them. But the Christian has a great deal 
more. He is perfectly distinctive in his character from the 
honest, truth-telling, thrifty and temperate man that the 
world makes. The Christian character is founded upon all 
these human virtues, for it supposes them all, and then, when 
it has laid the foundation of all this — the foundation of 
nature, — it follows up with the magnificent super-edifice of 
grace, and the Christian character is founded in man by the 
three virtues — faith, hope, and love. Therefore, St. Paul, 
speaking to the early Christians said to them, "Now, my 
friends and brethren, you are honest, you are sober, you are 
industrious, you have all these virtues and I praise you for 
them, I tell you now there remain unto you faith, hope and 
charity ; these three." For these three are the formation of 
the Christian character. Let us examine what these three 
virtues mean. First of all, my friends, these three virtues 
are distinguished from all the human virtues in this : that the 
human virtues — honesty, sobriety, temperance, truthfulness, 
fidelity and so on — establish a man in his proper relations to 
his fellow-men and to himself. They have nothing to say of 
God directly nor indirectly. If I am an honest man it means 
that I pay my debts. To' whom do I pay these debts ? To 
the people I owe money to — to my butcher, my baker, my 
tailor, etc. ; I meet their bills and pay them. I owe no man 
anything, and people say I am an honest man : that means 
that I have done my duty to my fellow-men. It is no direct 
homage to God. It is only homage to God when that truth 
springs from the supernatural and divine motive of faith. If 
I am a temperate man it means, especially to the Irishman, 
that I am a loving father, a good husband, a good son. An 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Irishman is all this as long as he is temperate ; but remem- 
ber that the wife, the child, the father and the mother are 
not God. Temperance makes him all right in relation to 
himself and his family around him. If I am a truth-telling 
man the meaning is I am "on the square," as they say, with 
my neighbors ; but my neighbors are not God. But the 
moment I am actuated by faith, hope and charity, that 
moment I am elevated towards God. My faith tells me 
theie is a God. If that God has spoken to me that God has 
told me things which I cannot understand, and yet I am 
bound to believe. Faith is the virtue that realizes Almighty 
God and all the things of God as they are known by Divine 
revelation. 

There are two worlds — the visible and the invisible : the 
world that we see and the world we do not see. The world 
that we see is our native country, our families, our friends, 
our churches, our Sunday for amusement, our pleasant even- 
ings and so on. All these things make up the visible world 
that we see. But there is another world that " eye hath not 
seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of 
man to conceive," and that world is the world revealed to 
us by faith. It is far more real, far more lasting, far more sub- 
stantial than the visible world. We say in the creed, " I believe 
in God the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and 
invisible." Now, in that invisible world, first of all is the God 
jthat created and redeemed us. We have not seen Him, yet 
we know that He exists. In that invisible world are the 
angels and saints. We have not seen them, yet we know they 
exist. In that invisible world are all the friends that we 
loved who have been taken from us by the hand of death ; 
those the very sound of whose name brings the tear to our 
eyes and the prayer of supplication to our lips. We see them 
no longer; but we know that 'they still live in that invisible 
world that " eye hath not seen." Now the virtue of faith 
in the Christian character is the power that God gives by 
divine grace to a man to realize that invisible world — to realize 
u so that he makes it more substantial to him than the world 
around him ; that he realizes more about it, and is more inter- 
ested in it and almost knows more about it, than the world 
around him. The virtue of faith is that power of God by 
which a man is enabled to realize the invisible, for the object 
of faith is invisible. Our Lord says to Thomas, the Apostle, 
" Because thou hast seen thou believest : blessed are they that 
have not seen and have believed." 

This is the first feature of the Christian character — the 



334 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



power of realizing the unseen, the power of knowing it, the 
power of feeling it, the power of substantiating it to the soul 
and to the mind ; until, out of that substantiation of the in- 
visible, comes the engrossing, ardent desire to make that invis- 
ible surround him. This is faith. Consequently the man of 
faith, in addition to being honest, industrious, temperate, 
truthful and having all these human virtues, is a firm believer. 
It costs him no effort to believe in that mystery because he 
cannot comprehend it — because he has never seen it. He 
knows it is true ; he admits that truth ; he stakes his own life 
upon the issue of that divine truth which he has appre- 
hended by the act of the intelligence and not by the 
senses. 

The next great feature of the Christian character is the 
virtue of hope. The Christian man is confident in his hope. 
God has made certain promises. God has said that neither 
in this world nor in the world to come will he abandon the 
just man. He may try him with poverty ; He may try him 
Avith sickness ; He may demand whatever sacrifice he will ; 
but He never will abandon him. Thus saith the Lord. Xow 
the virtue of hope is that which enables the Christian man to 
rest with perfect security — with unfailing, undying confidence 
in every promise of God, as long as the man himself fulfils 
the conditions of these promises. The consequence is that the 
Christian man, by virtue of this hope that is in him, is lifted 
up beyond all the miseries and sorrows of this world, and he 
looks upon them all in their true light. If poverty comes 
upon him he remembers the poverty of Jesus Christ, and he 
says in his hope, " "Well, the Lord passed through the ways of 
poverty into the rest of His glory ; so shall I rest as he did. 
I hope for it." If sickness or sorrow come upon him, he looks 
upon the trials and sorrows of our God. If difficulties rise in 
his path he never despairs in himself, for he has the promise 
of God that these difficulties are only trials sent by God, and, 
60oner or later, he will triumph over them — perhaps in time, 
but certainly in eternity. 

Finally, the third great feature of the Christian character 
is the virtue of love. It is the active virtue that is in a man, 
forcing him to love his God ; to be faithful to his God : to 
iove his religion ; to be faithful to that religion ; to love his 
neighbor as he loves himself; especially to love those who 
have the first claim upon him — the father and mother that 
love him, to whom he is bound to give honor as well as love ; 
■ — then the wife of his bosom, and the children that God has 
given him, to whom he is bound to give support and susten- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



33§ 



anee as well as love : his very enemies — he mast have no ene- 
my — no personal desire for revenge at all ; — but if there be a 
good cause, he must defend that cause, even though he smite 
his enemy — the enemy not of him personally, but of his cause ; 
but always be ready to show mercy and to exhibit love, even 
to his enemies. This is the Christian man ; how different 
from the mere man of the world ! The Christian man's faith 
acknowledges the claims of God; his hope strains after God; 
his love lays hold of God ; he makes God his own. 

Now, my friends, this being the Christian character, I ask 
yon to consider the second part of my proposition, namely, 
that the Irish people have received especial grace from God ; 
that no people upon the face of the earth have been so 
thoroughly formed into their national character as the Irish, 
by the divine principles of the Holy Catholic religion of Jesus 
Christ (applause). 

How are we to know the national character ? Well, my 
friends, we have two great clues or means of knowing. First 
of all, we have the past history of our race, and the tale that 
it tells us. Secondly, we have the men of to-day (wherever 
the Irishman exists), wherever they assemble together and 
form society — and the tale that that society tells us to-day. 

Let us first consider briefly the past of our nation, of 
our race, and then we will consider the Irishman of to-clay. 
Let us consider the past of our history as a race, as a nation, 
the history of faith, hope, and love for God ? Is it preemi- 
nently such a history ? Is it such a history of Christianity, 
faith, hope, and love that no other nation on the face of the 
earth can equal it ? If so, I have proved my proposition. 
Now, exactly one thousand and sixty years before America 
was discovered by Columbus, Patrick the Apostle landed in 
Ireland. The nation to which he came was a most ancient 
race ; derived from one of the primeval races that peopled 
the earth, — from the great Phoenician family of the East. 
They landed in the remote mists of pre-historic times upon 
a green isle in the Western ocean. They peopled it ; they 
colonized it ; they established laws ; they opened schools ; 
they had their philosophy, their learning, their science and 
art, equal to that of any other civilization of the day. They 
were a people well known, in their Pagan days, to the ancient 
Egyptians and the ancient Greeks. The name of the island, 
— the name by which we call it to-clay : Erin, was only a 
came that came after the more ancient name. For by the 
Greeks and the people of old, hundreds of years before the 
birth ®f Christ, our Ireland was called by the name of Oggia, 



336 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



or " the most ancient land." It was spoken of by the most 
remote authors of antiquity; the most ancient Greek writers, 
and other authors now extant, spoke of Ireland as the far 
distant ocean; spoke of it as a place of wonderful beauty, 
as a place of ineffable charm; spoke of it as something like 
that high Elysium of the poet's dream : " An island rising 
out of the sea, the fairest and most beautiful of all the sea's 
productions." 

We know that our ancestors at a most remote period 
received another colony from Spain. We know that the 
Milesians landed on an island they called Inisfail, their " land 
of destiny." We know that they came from the fair South- 
ern sunny land, bringing with them high valor, mighty hope, 
generous aspirations, and an advanced degree of civilization ; 
and the original inhabitants of Ireland intermingled their 
race with the Milesians. In that intermingling was formed 
the Celtic constitution which divided Ireland into four king- 
doms, all united under a high monarch and universal king 
(Ard-righ), — the high king of Ireland. The palace of Ireland's 
king, as fitting, was built almost in the centre of the island, 
two miles from the fatal Boyne. The traveller comes through 
a beautiful undulating land towards the hilltop, rich in ver- 
dure, abundant and fruitful, crowned with lovely wood on 
every side. It is the plain of " royal Meath." He arrives at 
the foot of the hill. The summit of that hill for centuries 
was crowned with the palace of Ireland's kings. It was called 
in the language of the people " Tara"— the place of the kings 
(applause). There, on Easter Sunday morning, in the year 
432, early in the fifth century of the Christian era, a most 
singular sight presented itself. Ireland's monarch sat upon 
his throne, in high council ; around him were the sov- 
ereign kings and chieftains of the nation : around him 
again in their ranks were the Pagan priests, — the druicls 
of the old fire worship ; around him again, on either side, on 
thrones as if they were monarchs, sat the magnificent ancient 
minstrels of Ireland, with snow-white flowing beards, — their 
harps upon their knees, — filling the air with the glorious mel- 
ody of Ireland's music, while they poured out upon the wings 
of song the time-honored story of Ireland's heroes and their 
glorious kings (applause). 

Suddenly a shadow fell upon the threshold, a mars 
appeared — with mitre on head, cope on shoulders, and a 
crozier in his hand, with the Cross of Christ upon it. And 
this was Patrick, who came from Rome, to preach Christian- 
ity to the Irish kings, chieftains and people (applause). They 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



337 



received him as "became a civilized and enlightened people. 
They did not stand, like other nations, in a wild hubbub of 
barbarism, to denounce the truth, as soon as they heard it, 
and put the truth-teller and the messenger to death; but they 
sat down, — these kings, these minstrels, these judges of the 
land, — these most learned philosophers; — they disputed with 
Patrick; they brought the keen weapons of human wisdom 
and of human intellect to bear against that sw T ord which he 
wielded. Oh ! it was the sword of the spirit, — the word of 
God — the Lord Jesus Christ. And when at length that 
king and chieftains, all these druids and bards, found that 
Patrick preached a reasonable religion ; that Patrick tried 
to prove his religion, and brought conviction unto their 
minds ; up rose at length the head of all the bards, and of 
Ireland's minstrels, — the man next in authority to the king, 
— the sainted [?] Dubhac, the Arch-minstrel of the royal 
monarch of Tara ; — up rose this man in the might of his 
intellect, in the glory of his voice and his presence, and lift- 
ing up his harp in his hand he said, " Hear me, oh high king 
and chieftains of the land ! I now declare that this man, 
who comes to us, speaks from God ; — that he brings a mes- 
sage from God. I bow before Patrick's God. He is the 
true God, and as long as I live this harp of mine shall never 
sound again save to the praises of Christianity and its 
God" [applause]. And the king and chieftains and bards 
and warriors and judges and people alike rose promptly; and 
never in the history of the world, — never was there a people 
that so embraced the light and took it into their minds, took 
into their hearts and put into their blood the light of Chris- 
tianity and its grace, as Ireland did in the day of her conver- 
sion. She did not ask him to shed one tear of sorrow. She 
rose up, put her hands in his like a friend ; took the message 
from his lips, surrounded him with honor and the popular 
veneration of all the people ; and before he died he received 
the singular grace, — distinct from all other saints, — that he 
alone, among all the other Apostles that ever preached the 
gospel, found a people entirely Pagan and left them entirely 
Christian [applause]. 

And now began that wonderful agency of Christian faith, 
Christian hope and Christian love, which I claim to have formed 
the national character of my race as revealed in their history. 
They took the faith from Patrick ; they rose at once into the 
full perfection of that divine faith. They became a nation of 
priests, bishops, monks and nuns, in the very day of the first 
dawning of their Christianity. The very men whom Patrick 
15 



338 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ordained priests, and whom he consecrated bishops, were the 
men whom he found pagans in the land to which he preached 
Christianity; the very women whom he consecrated to the di- 
vine service — putting veils upon their heads — the very women 
that rose at once under his hand to be the light and glory of Ire- 
land — as Ireland's womanhood has been from that day to this, — 
were the maidens and mothers of the Irish race, who first heard 
the name of Jesus Christ from the lips of St. Patrick (ap- 
plause). 

Well, I need not tell you the thrice-told tale how the epoch 
of our national history seems to run in cycles of 300 years. 
For 300 years after Patrick preached the Gospel Ireland was 
the holiest, most learned, most enlightened, most glorious coun- 
try in Christendom. From all the ends of the earth students 
came to study in those Irish schools; they came not by thous- 
ands but by tens of thousands. They brought back to every 
nation in Europe the wondrous tale of Ireland's sanctity, of 
Ireland's glory, of Ireland's peace, of Ireland's melody, of the 
soilness of her people and the devotion of her priesthood, the 
.mmaculate purity and wonderful beauty of the womanhood 
>I Ireland. 

After these three hundred years passed away began the 
first great effort which proved that Catholic faith was the 
true essence of the Irish character. The Danes invaded Ire- 
land, and for 300 long years, every year saw fresh arrivals; 
fresh armies poured in upon the land ; and for 300 years Ire- 
land was challenged to fight in defence of her faith, and to 
prove to the world, that until the Irish race and the Irish char- 
acter were utterly destroyed, that this Catholic faith never 
would cease to exist in the land. (Applause.) The nation — 
for, thank God, in that day we were a nation ! — the nation 
drew the nation's sword. Brightly it flashed from that scab- 
bard when it had rested for 300 years in Christian peace and 
holiness. Brightly did it flash from that scabbard in the 
day that the Dane landed in Ireland, and the Celt crossed 
6words with him for country, for fatherland, and, much 
more, for the altar, for religion, and for God. [Applause.] 
The fight went on. Every valley in the land tells its tale. 
There are many among us who, like myself, have been born 
and educated in the old country. What is more common, my 
friends, than to see what is called the old " rath," or mound, 
sometimes in the middle of the field, sometimes on the borders 
of a bog, sometimes on the hill-side, to see a great mound 
raised up. The people will tell you that is a "rath," and 
Ireland is full of them. Do you know what that means? 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



330 



When the clay of the "battle was over, when the Danes were 
conquered, and their bodies were strewn in thousands on the 
field, the Irish gathered them together and made a big hole 
into which they put them, and heaped them up into a great 
mound j covered them with dirt, and dug scraws or sods and 
covered them. In every quarter of the land are they found. 
What do they tell? They tell this, that until the day of 
judgment, until when all the sons of men shall be in the Yal- 
iey of Jehosaphat, no man will be able to tell of the thous- 
ands and the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands 
of Danish invaders that came to Ireland only to find a place in 
the grave, — only to find a grave. Ah, gracious God ! that we 
could say the same of every invader that ever polluted the vir- 
gin soil of Erin ! (Applause.) Well did Brian Boroimhe know 
how many inches of Irish land it took to make a grave for the 
Dane. Well did the heroic king of Meath — perhaps a greater 
character than even Brian himself, or O'Neil, — Malachi the II. 
of whom the poet says, — he " wore the collar of gold which 
he won from the proud invader," — a man who with his own 
hand slew three of the kings and leaders and warriors of the 
Danish army, — well did he know how many inches of Irish soil 
it took to bury a Dane. For in the Valley of Glenamada, in 
Wicklow, on a June morning, he found them and he poured 
down from the hill-tops with his Gaelic and CeltiG army upon 
them. Before the sun set over the Western Ocean to 
America (then undiscovered), there were 6,000 Danes 
stretched dead in the valley (applause). 

Well, my friends, 300 years of war passed away. Do you 
know what it means? Can you realize it to yourselves? 
Thore is no nation upon the face of the earth that has not 
been ruined by war ; you had only three years Oi war here 
in America, and you know how much evil it did. Just fancy 
300 years of war! War in every county, every province, 
every valley of the land, wai everywhere for 300 years ! The 
Irishman had to sleep with a drawn sword under his pillow, the 
hilt ready to his hand, and ready to spring up at a moment's 
warning, for the honor of his wife, for the honor of his daugh- 
ter, and the peace of bis household and the sacred altar of 
Christ (applause). And yet, at the end of 300 years, two 
things survived. Ireland',; ( 'atholic faith was as fresh as it ever 
was j and Ireland's music and minstrelsy was as luxuriant 
and nourishing in the land as if the whole time had been a 
time of peace. How grand a type is he of the faith and 
genius of our people, how magnificent a type of the Irish 
character, — a man of 83 years of age, mounted on his noble 



340 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



horse, clad in his grand armor, with a "battle-axe in one uplifted 
hand, and the crucifix in the other, — the heroic figure of 
Brian Boroinihe, as lie comes out on the pages of Irish his- 
tory and stands before us, animating his Irish army at Clon- 
tarf, telling who it was that died for them, and who it was 
they were to fight for. Before the evening sun set, Ireland 
— like the man who shakes a reptile off his hand, — shook 
from her Christian bosom that Danish army into the sea, and 
destroyed them. (Applause.) Yet O'Brien, the immortal 
monarch and king, of Ireland, was as skilled with the harp as 
he was with the battle-axe ; and in the rush and heat of the 
battle, no man stood before him and lived ; that terrible 
mace came down upon him, and sent him either to heaven or 
hell (loud cheering). In the halls of Kincora, upon the banks 
of the Shannon, when all the minstrels of Ireland gathered 
together to discuss the ancient melodies of the land, there 
was no hand among them that could bring out the thrill of 
the gold or silver cords with such skill as the aged hand of 
the man who was so terrible on the battle-field — a Christian 
warrior and minstrel : the very type of the Irish character 
was that man who, after three hundred years of incessant war, 
led the Irish forces upon the field of Clontarf, from which 
they swept the Danes into the sea (applause). 

Then came another 300 hundred years of invasion, and 
Ireland again fights for her nationality until the 16th cen- 
tury, just 300 years ago, and then she was told that after 
fighting for nearly 400 years for her nationality, she must 
begin and fight again, not only for that, but for her altar 
and her ancient faith. The Danes came back, they came to 
Ireland with the cry, " Down with the cross — down With the 
altar ! " Harry the 8th came to Ireland with the same cry ; 
but the Cross and the altar is up to-clay in Ireland, and Harry 
the 8th, I am greatly afraid, is — [looking downward.] (Ap- 
plause aiid laughter). 

Three hundred long years of incessant war, with 400 years 
before of incessant war, making the Irish people 1,000 years 
engaged in actual warfare, — 700 years with the Saxon and 
300 years before that with the Danes ! Where is the nation 
upon the face of the earth that has fought for 1,000 years? 
Why, one would imagine that they would all be swept away! 
How, in the world did they stand it ? We have been fighting 
a thousand years ! the battle begun by our forefathers has 
been continued down — well down to the year before last. 
[Laughter and applause.] The sword of Ireland that was 
drawn a thousand years ago, at the beginning of the 9th cen- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



341 



tury, still remains out of the scabbard, and has not been 
sheathed down to the end of the 19th century. Did ever any- 
body hear the like ? And yet, here we are, glory be to God ! 
[Applause and laughter.] Here we are as fresh and hearty as 
Brian Boroimhe on the morning of Clontarf, or as Hugh O* 
Neil was at the Yellow Ford ; or as Owen Roe O'Neil was at 
the field of Benburg, or as Patrick Sarsfield was in the trenches 
of Limerick, or as Robert Emmett in the dock at Green street. 
[Applause.] 

Now, my friends, let me ask you, — what did the Irish peo- 
ple iight for, for 600 years ? For 300 hundred years they 
fought with the Danes ; for 300 years they fought with Eng, 
land. The Danes invaded and desolated the whole land : the 
English, three times since Harry the 8th — taking it down to 
the present, — landed in Ireland and spread destruction and. 
desolation upon it. This Irish people fought for GOO years ; 
what did they fight for ? They fought for 600 years for some- 
thing they had never seen ; they never saw Christ, in the 
blessed Eucharist, because he was hidden from them under the 
sacramental veils of bread and wine ; they never saw the 
Mother of the God of Heaven ; they never saw the saints and 
angels of Heaven ; they never saw the Saviour upon the Cross; 
and yet, for that Christ on the Cross, for the Saviour in the 
Tabernacle and for the Mother of Purity in Heaven, and tho 
angels and saints, they fought these 600 years. [Applause.] 
They shed their blood until every acre of land in Ireland was 
red with the blood of the Irishman, that was shed for his 
religion and for his God. [Applause.] What does this prove? 
Does it not prove that, beyond all other races and nations, the 
Irish character was able to realize the unseen, and so to sub- 
stantiate the things of faith as to make them of far greater 
importance than liberty, than property, than land, than educa- 
tion, than life? For any man who goes out and says, "I am 
ready to give up every inch of land I possess ; I am ready to 
go into exile; I am ready to be sold as a slave in Barbadoes ; 
1 am ready to be trampled under foot or to die for Jesus 
Christ, who is present now, though I never saw Him : n — that 
man is preeminently a man of faith. The Irish nation 
for GOO years answered the Saxon and Dane thus: We will 
fight until we die for our God who is upon our altars. [Ap- 
plause, and cries of " We will, — we will ! "] Now, I ask you 
to find among the nations of the earth, any one nation that 
was ever asked to suffer confiscation and robbery and exile 
and death for their faith, and who did it, like one man, for GOO 
years? When you have found that nation, when you are able 



342 



THE CATIIOLIC MISSION. 



to say to me — such a people did that, and such another people 
did that, and prove it to me, I will give up what I have said,— 
namely, that the Irish are the most formed in character and 
in their faith of any people in the world. As soon as you are 
able to prove to me that any other people ever stood so much 
for their faith, I stand corrected: but until you prove it, 1 
hold that the Irish people and race are the most Catholic on 
the face of the earth. 

Now, my friends, if I want any proof of the Irish faculty 
of realizing the Unseen, why, my goodness, we are always at 
it. (Laughter.) The Irish child, us soon as he arrives at the 
age of reason, has an innate faculty of realizing the unseen. 
When he comes out of the back door and looks into the field, 
he imagines he sees a fairy in every bush. (Laughter.) If 
he sees a butterfly upon a stalk in the field, he thinks it is a 
Leprechavm. (Laughter.) I remember when a boy, growing 
up, studying Latin, having made up my mind to be a priest. 
— I was a grown lad ; and yet there w T as a certain old arch- 
way in Bowling Green, in Galway, to which there was 
attached a tradition ; I know there are some here that will 
remember it. It was near the place where Lynch, the Mayor, 
hanged his son, hundreds of years ago ; near the Protestant 
churchyard, and that gave it a bad name. (Laughter.) At 
any rate, grown as I was, learning Latin, knowing everything 
about the catechism, and having made up my mind to be a 
priest, I was never able to pass under that aich after night- 
fall without running for dear life. (Applause and laughter.) 
This faith, if you will, — this Irish superstition is a faith. 
Remember that, wherever superstition — especially of a sj)irit- 
ual character — exists, there is proof that there is a character 
formed to realize the Unseen. [Cries of " That's so ! "] 

Now, my friends, consider the next great impress of the 
Christian character stamped upon the Irish people. The 
apostle says " we are saved by hope." The principle 
of hope imposes confidence in the divine promises of God, 
in the certainty of their fulfilment — a confidence never 
shaken, that never loses itself, that never loosens its hold 
upon God, that never, for an instant, yields to depression or 
despair. I ask you if that virtue is found stamped upon our 
Irish character ? Tell me first of all, as I wish to prove it, 
during this thousand years fighting for Ireland, was there 
ever a day in the history of our nation when Ireland lost 
courage and struck her flag? That flag was never pulled 
down ; it has been defeated on many a field ; it has been 
dragged in the dust — in the dust stained with the blood of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



348 



Ireland's best and most faithful sons ; it has been washed in 
the accursed waters of the Boyne ; but never has the nation, 
for a single hour, hesitated to lift that prostrate banner, and 
fling it out to the breeze of heaven, and proclaim that 
Ireland was still full of hope. [Applause.] Scotland 
had as glorious a banner as ours. The Scotch banner was 
hauled down upon the plains of Culloden, and the Scots, 
chivalrous as their fathers were, never raised that flag to the 
mast-head again ; it has disappeared. It is no longer "Ire- 
land and Scotland and England," as it used to be ; it is 
" Great Britain and Ireland ? " Why is it " Great Britain 
and Ireland." "Why is it not simply "Great Britain?" 
Why is the sovereign called the "Queen of Great 
Britain and Ireland?" Because Ireland refused to give up 
her hope ; and Ireland never acknowledged that she was ever 
anything else except a nation. (Great applause.) Well, my 
friends, it was that principle of hope that sustained our 
fathers during those thousand years they kept their faith. 
And the word of scripture, as recorded in the book of Tobias, 
is this : when the Jews were banished into Babylonish cap- 
tivity — when the people of every nation came to them and 
said, " Why should you be persecuted on account of your 
God ? Give him up. Why do you refuse to conform to the 
laws and usages of the people around you ? Give up your 
Gocl. Don't be making fools of yourselves." The Jews 
said : " Speak not so ; for we are the children of the saints; 
we know and hope in our God. He never forsakes those 
who never change their faith in Him." This is the inspired 
language of Scripture ; and well the Irish knew it ; — and 
therefore as long as Irishmen kept their faith to their God 
and to their altar, so they wisely and very constantly refused 
to lay down their hope." 

Christian character is made up of hope as well as of faith 
and of love. If Ireland laid down her hope in despair, that 
high note of Christian character would never be in her. The 
Irish people never knew they were beaten. Year after year 
■ — one day out and another clay in — while the nations around 
were amazed at the bull-dog tenacity of that people with two 
ideas — namely, that they were Catholic, and a nation — Ire- 
land never lost sight of her hope. (Applause.) What fol- 
lowed from this ? What was the consequence of this ? 
Enshrined in the national heart and in the national aims, 
there has been — wherever the Irishman exists, there has been 
the glory upon his head of the man whose courage in the 
hour of danger could be relied upon. Every nation in 



344 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Europe has bad a taste of what Ireland's courage is. They 
fought in the armies of Germany, in those Austrian armies, 
where ten thousand Irishmen, for thirty years, were every 
day encamped in the field. They fought in the armies of 
Spain; ten thousand Irishmen encamped in the field. They 
fought in the armies — once so glorious — of France — thirty 
thousand Irishmen with Patrick Sarsfield at their head. 
(Applause.) Did they ever turn their backs and run away? 
Never. At the battle of Ramillies, when the French were 
beaten, and they were flying before the English, the English 
in the heat of their pursuit met a division of the French, 
army. Ah ! that division was the Irish Brigade (applause). 
They stopped them in the full tide of their victory, and they 
drove them back and took the colors out of their hands and 
marched off after the French army (great applause). If any 
of you go to Europe it will be worth your while to go to an 
old Flemish town called Ypres. In the cathedral you will 
find flags and banners lying about. If you will ask the sex- 
ton to explain these flags to you (perhaps you will have to 
give him a sixpence), he will come to one of these flags and 
say, " That was the banner that the Irish took from the 
English in the very hour of their victory at Ramillies." 
(Applause.) King Louis was going to turn and fly at the 
battle of Fontenoy ; but Marshal Saxe told him to wait for 
five minutes until he should see more. "Your majesty, don't 
be in such a hurry; wait a minute; it will be time enough 
to run away when the Irish run" (applause). Calling out 
to Lord Clare he said : " There are your men, and there are 
the Saxons." The next moment there was a hurra heard 
over the field. In the Irish language they cried out — ■ 
" Remember Limerick, and down with the Sassenach ! " That 
column of Englishmen melted before the charge of the Irish, 
just as the snow melts in the ditch when the sun shines upon 
it (applause). When a man loses hope he loses courage ; he 
gives it up. "It is a bad job," he says; "there is no use 
going on any farther." But as long as he can keep his 
courage up, with the lion in his heart, so long you may be 
sure there is some grand principle of hope in him. Ours is a 
race that has almost "hoped against hope." I say that 
comes from our Catholic religion — the Catholic religion that 
tells us : " You are clown to-day — don't be afraid; hold on ; 
lean upon your God. You will be up to-morrow." (Ap- 
plause.) 

The third grand feature of the Christian is love — a lovo 
both strong and tender : a love that first finds its vent in 



TIIE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



345 



God, with all of the energies of the spirit and the heart and 
soul going straight for God ; crushing aside whatever is in its 
path of the temptations of men ; and in faith and hope and 
love, making straight for God. Trampling upon his passions, 
the man of love goes straight towards God; and in that jour- 
ney to God he will allow nothing to hinder him. ISTo matter 
what sacrifice that God calls upon him to make, he is ready to 
make it ; for the principle of sacrifice is divine love. Most 
assuredly, never did her God call upon Erin for a sacrifice that 
Erin did not make it. God sent to Ireland the messenger of 
His wrath, the wretched Elizabeth. She called upon Ireland 
for Ireland's liberty and Ireland's land ; and the people gave 
up both rather than forsake their God. God sent Ireland an- 
other curse in Oliver Cromwell, — a man upon whom I would 
not lay an additional curse, for any consideration ; because 
for a man to lay an additional cause upon Oliver Cromwell 
would be like throwing an additional drop of water on a 
drowned rat (laughter). Cromwell called upon the Irish peo- 
ple, and said, " Become Protestant, and you will have your 
land ; you will have your possessions, your wealth. Kemain 
Catholic, and take your choice, — ' Hell or Connaught.' " Ire- 
land made the sacrifice ; and, on the 25th day of May, 1651, 
every Catholic supposed to be in Ireland crossed the Shannon, 
and went into the wild wastes^of Connaught rather than give 
up their faith. William of Orange came to Ireland ; and he 
called upon the Irish to ' renounce their faith or submit to a 
new persecution — new penal laws. Ireland said : " I will 
fight against injustice as long as I can ; but when the arm of 
the nation is paralyzed, and I can no longer wield the sword, 
one thing I will hold in spite of death and hell, and that is 
my glorious Catholic faith." (Great applause.) If they did 
not love their God would they have done this ! Would they 
have suifered this ? If they did not prize that faith, would 
they have preferred it to their liberty, their wealth, and their 
very lives? No, no ! Patrick sent the love of God and the 
Virgin Mother deep into the hearts of the Irish ; and in our 
Irish spirit, and in the blood of the nation it has remained to 
this day. Wherever an Irishman, true to his country, true to 
his religion exists, there do you find a lover of Jesus Christ 
and of Mary. 

More than this, their love for their neighbor shows this in 
two magnificent ways— the fidelity of the Irish husband to 
the Irish wife, and the Irish son to the Irish father and mother, 
and of the Irish father to his children. Where is there a na- 
tion in whom those traits are more magnificently brought out? 
15* 



346 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



England told Ireland, a few years ago, that the Irish husbands 
might divorce their Irish wives. Nothing was heard from 
one end of the land to the other but a loud shout of a laugh. 
"Oh, listen to that! So a man can separate from his wife! 
The curse of Cromwell on ye!" (Applause.) England told 
the fathers of Ireland that it was a felony to send their chil- 
dren to school. And yet never did the Irish fathers neglect 
that sacred duty of education. When, actually, it was found 
that a man was sending his children to school, he was liable 
to a fine and imprisonment. In spite of the imprisonment and 
the fine of their people, the Irish people, who never have been 
serfs, refused to be the servants of ignorance; and Ireland 
was always an educated nation. (Applause.) In the worst 
day of our persecution — in the worst day of our misery — 
there was one man that was always respected in the land next 
to the priest, and that was the " poor scholar," with a few 
books under his arm, perhaps with but three halfpence worth 
of clothes upon him, going from one farm house to the other, 
with the " God save all here ! " He got the best of the house, 
the best bed, the cosiest place in the straw chair. And the 
children were all called in from the neighboring houses and 
from the village. He could spend a week from one house to 
another. Every house in Ireland was turned into a school- 
house at one time or another. Hence I have known men, old 
men of my own family, who remembered 1782. I have seen 
them, when a child, in their old age, and these men, brought 
up in those days of penal persecution and misery, with its en- 
forced ignorance, were first-class controversialists. They knew 
how to read and write; they knew Dr. Gallagher's sermons 
by heart. There was no Protestant Bishop or Protestant 
Minister in Ireland that could hold his ground five minutes 
before them; and the probability was, that after having con- 
vinced his reason and opened his eyes to the truth, they were 
equally prepared to blacken both his eyes. (Great laughter 
and applause.) 

The nation's love, the people's love for that which was nest 
to their God, the very next, is the love of a man for his coun- 
try. Is tl ere any land so loved as Ireland by its people ? 
Sarsfield, dying upon the plains of Landen, is only a fair type 
of the ordinary Irishman. There was many a good man, as 
heroic a man, in the ranks of the Irish Brigade that fell that 
day as Sarsfield, who, in full career of victory, at the head of 
Lorel Clare's Dragoons, following the British army as they 
fled from him; William of Orange in their ranks flying and 
showing the broad of his back to Sarsfield, as, sword in hand. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



347 



gleaming like the sword of God's justice, the Irish hero 
was in full chase, when a musket ball struck him to the heart, 
and he fell dying from his horse. The blood was welling out 
hot from his very heart ; he took the full of his hand of his 
heart's blood, and raising his eyes to Heaven he cried: "Oh, 
that this was shed for Ireland! " A true Irishman ! Where 
was the nation that was ever so loved ? In the three hundred 
years of persecution, take the " Bhreathair" the old Irish 
Friar, the Dominicans and Franciscans, who were of the first 
families of the land — the O'Xeils, the Maguires, the McDon- 
nells, the McDermotts, down in Galway ; the Frenches, the 
Lynches, the Blakes, and the Burkes. These fair youths used 
to be actually smuggled out by night and sent off the coast 
of Ireland to Rome, to France, and to Spain, to study there. 
Enjoying all the delicious climates of those lovely countries, 
surrounded by honor, leading easy lives, filling the time with 
the study and intellectual pleasures of the priesthood, every 
man felt uneasy. To use the old familiar phrase, " They were 
like a hen on a hot griddle," as long as they were away from 
Ireland, although they knew that in Ireland they were liable 
to be thrown into prison or be subjected to death; during 
Cromwell's persecution, if one fell in the ranks, another step- 
ped into his place. Of six hundred Dominicans in Ireland, 
at the time of Queen Elizabeth, there were only four remained 
after she passed her mild hand over them. Where did they 
come from ? From out of the love of Ireland and the heart and 
the blood of her best sons. They would not be satisfied with 
honors and dignities in other lands. No. Their hearts were 
hungry until they caught sight of the green soil and stood 
among the shamrocks once more. (Applause.) 

And now I say to yon, and all the history of our nation 
proves it, I say that the Irish race to-day is not one bit 
unlike the race of two or three hundred years ago. We are 
the same people : and why should we not be ? We have 
their blood ; we have their names ; their faith ; their tradi- 
tions, their love. I ask you, is not the Irishman of to-day 
a man of faith, hope, and love? Who built this beautiful 
church ? Who erected this magnificent altar ? Who made 
the place for Father Mooney's voice, pleasantly tinged with 
the old Irish roll and brogue — (laughter and applause) ? He 
has a little touch of it and he is not ashamed of it — (renewed 
laughter). I remember once when a lady in England said 
to me : " The moment you spoke to me, Father, I at once 
perceived you were an Irishman ; you have got what they 
call the brogue." "Yes, madame," said I, "my father had 



348 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



it, and my mother had it ; but my grandfather and my grand- 
mother did not have it ; because they did not speak the Eng- 
lish at all." (Applause and laughter.) " Yes," I said, " I 
have the brogue ; and I am full of hope that when ray soul 
comes to Heaven's gate, and I ask St. Peter to admit me, I 
think when he hears the touch of the brogue on my tongue, 
he will let me in." But I asked who built this church ? who 
has covered America with our glorious Catholic churches? 
All credit and honor to every Catholic race. All honor and 
credit to the Catholic Frenchman and to the Catholic Ger- 
man. The Germans of this country — those brave men ; those 
sons of Catholics ; those descendants of the great Roman 
emperors that upheld for so many centuries the sceptre in 
defence of the altar, — they have done great things in this 
country ; but, my friends, it is Ireland, after all, that has done 
the lion's share of it. (Great applause.) What brought the 
Irishman to America — so bright, so cheerful, so full of hope ? 
The undying hope that was in him ; the confidence that, 
wherever he went — as long as he was a true Catholic, and 
faithful to the traditions of the Church to which he belongs, 
and to the nation from which he sprang, that the hand of 
God would help him and bring him up to the surface, sooner 
or later. And the Irishman of to-day, like his nation, is as 
hopeful as any man in the past time (cheers). 

Have we not a proof of their love ? Ah ! my friends, who 
is it that remembers the old father and mother at home ? 
Who, among the emigrants and strangers coming to this land, 
whose eye fills with the ready tear as soon as he hears the 
familiar voice reminding us of those long in their graves, as 
soon as their names are mentioned ? Who is it that is only 
waiting to earn his first ten dollars, in order to send five home 
to his aged father and mother ? Who is it that would as 
soon think of cutting out his tongue from the roots, or to take 
the eyes out of his head, as abandon the wife of his bosom? 
The true Catholic Irishman. (Applause.) These things are 
matters of observation and experience, just as the past is a 
matter of history. And, therefore, I say that you and I are 
not ashamed of the men that are in their graves, even though 
they lie in martyr graves. As we are true to them, so shall 
our children be true to us. As we were true to them, so we 
shall continue to be true to them. That is the secret of 
Ireland's power for the faith that has never changed, the hope 
that never despairs, the love that is never extinguished ; I 
say the secret of Ireland's power is this mighty love that lifts 
itself up to God. Dispersed and scattered as we are, that 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



349 



love that makes us all meet as brethren ; that love that brings 
the tear to the eye at the mention of the old soil ; that love 
that makes one little word of Irish ring like music in our 
ears ; that love that makes us treasure the traditions of our 
history ; that love makes us a power, still ; — and we are a 
power, though divided by three thousand miles of Atlantic 
Ocean's waves rolling between America and Ireland at home. 
But the Irishman in America knows that his brother at 
home look to him Avith hope ; and the Irishman in Ireland 
knows that his brother in America is only waiting to do what 
he can for the old land. 

What is it you can do ? — that is the question. I answer, 
be true to your religion, be true to your fatherland, be true 
to your families and to yourselves, be true to the glorious 
Republic that opened her arms to receive you and give you 
the rights of citizenship. (Great and prolonged applause.) 
Be true to America ; she has already had a sample of what 
kind of men she received when she opened her arms to the 
Irish. They gave her a taste of it at Fredericksburgh, fight- 
ing her battles ; they gave her a sample of it all through those 
terrible campaigns ; she knows what they are, and begins to 
prize it. Never fear, when you add to your Irish brains and 
intellect by education, and to your Irish minds by temper- 
ance, and to your Irish hands by the spirit of industry and 
self-respect, — be men ; even in this land, I say, be Irishmen/ 
(Applause.) Then the day will come when this great Irish 
element in America will enter largely into the council cham- 
bers of this great nation, and will shape her policy, will form 
her ideas and her thoughts in a great measure, pressing them 
in the strong mould of catholicity and of justice. And when 
that day comes to us, I would like to see who would lay a 
" wet finger " on Ireland. (Applause.) This is what I mean 
when I tell you what Ireland hopes from America. Ireland's 
bone and sinew is in America; and it is in the intelligence 
of her children in America and of every principal virtue to 
the influence that we attach to that virtue, and that enlight- 
enment, and to that intelligence and talent, that will assuredly 
bring, in this country, the help that Ireland looks for. 

Suppose that for Ireland some coercion bill is going to 
pass, and some blackguard is going to trample upon the old 
nation. If the Irishman knows the position of his country- 
men in America, he will say, " Hold on, my friend; don'*, 
begin until you get a dispatch from Washington." " Hold 
on, my friend ; there ure Irish Senators in the great Senate ; 
there are Irish Congressmen in the great Congress ; there are 



350 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Irishmen in the Cabinet ; there are Irishmen behind the guns$ 
there are Irishmen writing out political warnings and proto- 
cols ; there are Irish ambassadors at the foreign courts ; learn 
what they have to say before you trample upon us." This is 
what I mean. I speak upon this altar as a priest and an 
Irishman. I am not afraid to say it. I don't care if it went 
under the very nose of Queen Victoria and Judge Keogh. 
(Applause and laughter.) 

And now, my friends, you know that whatever way a 
priest may begin his lecture, when he goes through it he 
always ends with a kind of exhortation. In the name of God, 
let us make a resolution here to-night, to be all that I have 
described to you — all an Irishman ought to be — and leave the 
rest to God. (Renewed applause, amid which the lecturer 
retired.) 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in the Brooklyn 
Academy of Music, for the benefit of St. Augustine's Church, on Sunday 
evening - , June 2d 



" THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE WANTS OF SOCIETY." 



Ladies and Gentlemen: The subject on which I pro- 
pose to address you this evening is the most important that 
could occupy your mind or mine, viz. : What are the great 
wants of society in our age, and how are we to meet them?" 
X remember once meeting a poor man in Ireland, and he 
looked very dejected : so I said to him : " Tim, what is the 
matter with you ?" He took an old purse out of his pocket 
— and it was empty. " That is what is the matter with me," 
says lie (laughter). "I have an empty purse, and I don't 
know how to fill it ! " And so it is, my friends. 

The first great question that comes before every age and 
every class of society is : How are we to meet the most press- 
ing wants of our people ? Now, what are the wants of soci- 
ety in this, our day, and how are we to meet them ? That is 
the great question that I am come to answer to you this even- 
ing. What are the wants of society in this, our present day ? 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



351 



I ask the philosopher ; I ask the statesman ; I ask the polit- 
ical economist ; I ask the observer of men ; I ask the director 
of morals; I ask the man who exults over the success, 
and pines and groans over the sorrows, of society : What 
are the wants of our day, and how are we to meet them? I 
hold, — and I think, you will agree with me, — that it is not 
this little, miserable thing, or that, that ought to occupy our 
attention when we ask ourselves the mighty question : 
" What are the wants of our age ? " To be sure, if you ask 
an individual man what are the wants of his age, he will 
narrow them by the compass of his own understanding, and 
of his own circle. I remember once asking a shoemaker in 
Ireland what he considered the wants of the age ; and he 
scratched the back of his head, and he said : " I think," said 
he, " the great want of our age is to remove the tax on leather" 
(laughter). Now it is not in this spirit that we come together 
this evening. I know that I have the honor to address, not 
only my fellow-Catholics, — [and many among them are my 
fellow-countrymen] — but that I have also the honor, this even- 
ing, to address a great many Protestant gentlemen and ladies. 
And therefore, beiore such a distinguished assembly, I must 
rise to the dignity of the occasion, and I must endeavor to 
meet their views, as well as to express my own, in answer- 
ing the question : " What are the wants of our age ? " 

Well, my friends, in order to answer that question prop- 
erly, I must ask you to remember that we all have three great 
relations. The first of these is our relation to God. The sec- 
ond is our relation to our family and ourselves — to the little 
world that surrounds us. And the third is, our relation to the 
great world around us, that constitutes the state and the 
society in which we live. These, surely, are the three great 
wants of every age. Every age and every condition of the 
society of man demands, first of all, the tribute to God that 
belongs to God. Next to God in sacredness, in necessity, in 
claim upon us, comes our domestic family and circle. . Thirdly, 
comes the claim that the society in which we live makes upon 
us : and any man that acquits himself properly of all duty 
that he owes to God above him, to his family around him, and 
to the state and society in which he lives, that man may bo 
said, truly and emphatically, to come up to all the wants of 
the age, and all the demands that God and man make upon 
him (applause). If, therefore, you would know, my friends, 
what are the wants of our age, I ask you to reflect what is 
the first demand of God? What is the first demand of the 
family ? What is the first demand of society ? You will find 



352 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



that the very first thing the Almighty God asks of us is faith : 
the tribute of divine faith. The very first thing that the 
family— the wife and the children — ask of every man, is purity 
and fidelity ; and the great demand that society makes upon 
every man is the demand for honesty, honor, firmness of pur- 
pose : honesty in his dealings with his fellow-man ; in all com- 
mercial relations with society ; in all his adrninstrative capa- 
city. Behold, now, these three great wants of our age. That 
is to say, that our age is wanting in these three ; that they 
do not exist ; that there is not supply sufficient to meet the 
demand. You know that the markets are always thrown out 
of gear, and there is confusion in the commercial world, 
whenever demand and supply don't meet each other. For 
instance : If there is an extraordinary demand for meat, and 
the butchers are not able to meet it, why, all the people 
are thrown into confusion. Prices are raised. There is a 
rush upon the market. If, again, there is a great demand for 
gold, such that the banks are not able to meet it, then there 
is a rush of people on the banks, and you find them smother- 
ing each other in their maddened endeavors to get their 
orders paid, and their notes cashed. At length there comes 
a rush on the bank in the evening ; people are aroused ; — and 
they are told there is no more money ! And so with supply 
and demand in everything. Wherever there is not a supply 
there is confusion. So it is with this world of ours. The 
world demands three articles : Faith, Purity and Honesty. 
You will pardon me if I say to you, as an observer of my 
fellow-men, we do not meet the demand ; we have not suffi- 
cient supply. We have not sufficient supply of faith. What 
does faith mean? It means two things, my friends. Every 
man who wishes to analyze what faith means, will find that it 
means two things, viz.: first, certain knowledge — absolute 
certainty of knowledge ; secondly, the practical knowledge 
that influences the lives of men. There are two kinds of 
knowledge. There is a knowledge that does not contribute 
anything to the sum of a man's actions. For instance, if I 
solve a problem in mathematics — in geometry, say, — and I 
come to a fair conclusion and prove my propositions, what 
then ? Why, I have gained a point in knowledge. But that 
does not influence my actions. It does not make me eat my 
breakfast with any more appetite. It does not induce me to 
abstain from this thing, or that thing, or anything. It does 
not make me meet my friend with more good will. It does 
not enable me to pardon an outrage. It does not enable me 
or induce me to abstain from a single sin. It is mere inci- 
dental knowledge, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



353 



But there is another kind of knowledge A\hich comejs with 
the power of a precept, which tells me such and such is the 
case, such and such is the fact, and you are called upon to act 
up to it. Such, for instance, is the knowledge I have that I 
must forgive the man that injures me. I go out in the street 
witli that knowledge, and a man insults me, and, instead of 
striking that man, or resenting the insult, I quietly bear it and 
pass on. The knowledge that tells me that I must love my 
neighbor as myself, and that I must not injure him in person 
or in propert}', that knowledge is in my mind, and I go out 
among my friends. I have an opportunity of gaining some- 
thing by injuring my fellow-man. I find that I can step 
into his place, that I can get his situation if I can only say, 
"He is a bad man ; I know he is a bad man;" if I only say 
that, his employer will dismiss him and employ me. But I 
remember the principle of divine knowledge that is in my 
mind: "Don't say a word about that man; don't do any- 
thing to him, or say anything of him, that you would not 
have said or done to yourself/' And so, I refrain. That is 
practical knowledge. Now, my friends, faith means knowl- 
edge, and practical knowledge ; and this is precisely what 
our age is deficient in. Our age is deficient, first of all, in 
knowledge. Take away the Catholics that live in every land 
— take us away — leave the rest of mankind — leave them 
Tinder their various denominations, Protestant and Methodist 
and Baptist and Anabaptist and Quaker, and so on — and 
what knowledge have they? What knowledge have they 
that rises to the grandeur and the dignity of faith? God 
forbid that I should conceive an insulting thought, or say an 
insulting word of, or to, my fellow-man. But I ask you to 
reflect; what knowledge have they? They are broken up 
into a hundred congregations and a hundred sects. One 
says one thing; another says another. It was only last 
Sunday that I saw the newspapers — the New York papers — 
and I amused myself on Monday morning by spending half- 
an-hour reading them. And there I saw, in one, how Mr. 
So-and-so said one thing. He said that man did not require 
this thing, or the other thing. Mr. So-and-so, in the next 
street, said he did require it (laughter). There was a 
holy Quaker stood up in one of these assemblies, who shook 
his head, signed, and "groaned to the Lord." And then, 
when he had "groaned to the Lord," and "joined himself to 
the Father," what do you think he did say? He said that 
"Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, was not the Son of 
God at all ! It was all a mistake ! " On the other hand, we 



354 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



iiad another man saying, and saying truly, thai " If any 
man asserted that, he was worthy of eternal damnation ! " 

And so, broken up into a thousand various sectaries, a 
thousand opinions, ask any one man this, — put him before you, 
and say : " Tell me, friend, how do you know that you are 
right ? " He will say : " I know it, because I find it in the 
Scriptures." "But the man who contradicts you finds what 
ho says in the Scriptures ! You say that Christ is the Son 
of (rod ? " " Yes." " But how do you know that you are 
right?" " I find it in the Scriptures." "But the Quakers 
say — He is not. How do you know you are right ?" " Oh, 
it is in the Scriptures ! " And so they all appeal to the Scrip- 
tures. And why ? Because the Scriptures, though they are 
the inspired word of God, do not tell one thing to all men. 
They tell you what you like to get from them ; they tell you 
what your opinion is, and what you would like it to be, and 
they tell me mine. So that there are four Scriptures instead 
of one — yours, and yours, and yours (laughter). And then, 
if you say to any one of these men, " Are you perfectly sure 
that you are right ! " " Oh, yes ! " " Are you sure now, so 
that you are beyond all possibility of making a mistake ? " 
" Certainly ; perfectly sure." " Then you are infallible ! " 
a Oh, yes ; I am infallible." " Why, then, you are a Pope ! 
What right have you to complain of the Catholics when they 
say the Pope is infallible ? " (Laughter.) Can you be mis- 
taken or can you not ? If they say they can, then I turn away 
at once and say, " My friend, I have nothing to say to you. 
If you can be mistaken on this question of religion I want to 
have not another word to say to you ; because, if you are 
mistaken, you might lead me into a mistake too ; but if you 
are not mistaken, and if you cannot be mistaken, then you are 
an infallible man." Now, show me the promise that made 
you infallible ! " What ? " he says. " Show me," I reply, 
"what promises made you infallible. If you have a right 
to it, why, in the name of Heaven, say that we, Catholics, are 
idolators, because we say that the Head of the Church, the 
man who succeeded St. Peter, the man to whom through Sfe» 
Peter, Christ our Lord said : ' Thou shalt never fail to con- 
firm, thy brethren ' — because we say that man is infallible, 
because he guides and informs the Church ? You say he is 
not ; you say the Church is not infallible — but you are ! "N ow, 
my friend, I don't believe you !" It would be something like 
the fool we read of? There was a fool in the county of Gal- 
way in '98 — the " year of the troubles," and General Merrick 
went down to Galway and commanded the troops. They 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



355 



Were hanging the people then. The fool saw the General rido 
tip with his cocked hat, and the white feather in it, at the 
head of his troops. The fool made a cocked hat for himself, 
and put a white feather in it. Then he walked round the 
town and said he was General Merrick. So it is with every 
man of these. He says the Pope has no right to be infallible. 
The Catholic Church has no right to be infallible. Then he 
puts on his cocked hat, and says : But I am infallible 1 
(Laughter.) If you believe the Pope you are a fool ! If you 
believe the Catholic Church you are a fool ! But if you don't 
believe me you will be damned ! (Laughter.) 

Now, it comes to this, or it comes to nothing at all. If a 
Quaker says to me he hath the right, then I say to that 
Quaker: " Yes ; and if I don't belong to you and your com- 
munion, then I am wrong. If I am right you are wrong. If 
I am wrong I am not in the way of salvation." Therefore, 
if I don't become a Quaker I am damned ! Well now, my 
friend, recollect for a moment. Not one voice outside the 
Catholic Church pretends to lay claim to knowledge, but only 
to opinion. Each one says: "Well, that is my opinion." 
But I answer : " Opinion is not faith. Faith is knowledge ; 
faith is certain knowledge. Faith means not only strength 
of opinion and power of conviction; but faith means to 
know — to know the thing as clearly aud as plainly as we 
know our own existence. That is faith, and that alone. For 
our Lord said: "I will not send you inquiring about the 
truth ; I will not send you to form your opinions about what 
is the truth ; I will not send you to argue out convictions 
about the truth ; but I am come to give you the truth. I am 
the truth ; you shall know the truth ; and the truth shall 
make you free " (applause). You shall know the truth I 
You shall have a knowledge of it as certain, and more certain 
and strong, than of your own existence. More than this : 
Faith is a knowledge of a practical kind. It tells us not only 
what we are to believe but it tells us, also, what we are to do. 
It is all very well for a man to believe this, that, and the other 
point of Scripture. As for instance, all men believe in the 
existence of God. All men believe in the Divinity of our 
Divine Lord, — with a few exceptions. All men with the same 
few exceptions, believe that He, coming down from Heaven, 
came down to- redeem and save us. And in those sermons 
that you read, delivered outside the Catholic Church, )^ou 
will always find that they are beating about this and about 
that when they are speaking about the Divinity of our Lord; 
the atonement of the Son of God ; the wonderful condescen- 



350 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



■ision of God becoming man. But how rarely do they speak 
■ about the specific duties of man ? How rarely do they tel ] 
their people, " You must do this or you must avoid that." 
The moment you enter the Catholic Church, that moment do 
you find yourself face to face with a long list of duties that 
belong to you personally. The Catholic Church lays hold 
of you and says : " See here, my friend ; you must go to con- 
fession ; you must purify your conscience ; you must pray, 
morning and evening ; you must go to Mass ; you must fre- 
quent the sacraments; you must receive Holy Communion, 
and receive it worthily ; you must fast on such and such days ; 
you must make restitution, if you have wronged any one ; " 
and so on. There is a whole list of practical duties, which is 
the very first thing that we meet when we come into the 
Catholic Church. The reason of this is, that in the Catholic 
Church faith ceases to be a sentiment or a mere act of devo- 
tion — a mere uplifting of the mind to God. It is this, all this, 
and more. It brings with it an immense list of personal 
duties, necessary for the sanctifying of every man. 

Now I ask you is not this faith, certain in its knowledge 
— is it not the great want of our age? What is the cry that 
we hear, nowadays, outside the Catholic Church ? The cry 
is : " Oh, the number of men that are infidels ! The number 
-of men that never go to Church at all ! The number of men 
that scarcely believe anything ! " We find so many of them 
saying : " Oh, I don't care for going to Church, because I 
don't like the preacher ! I don't care about the sermons. I 
don't goto Church because there's no excitement." Another 
will say : "I don't go to Church because it is the pleasantest 
hour of the Sunday, and I like to take a walk in the fresh air." 
Another one will say: "Well, I have my own notions ; I 
have read for myself, and I think I know more than these men 
who preach ; and I don't go to Church because I think I know 
more than they." The Protestant faith so stands practi- 
cally at this hour that there is very little faith to be found 
among the cultivated intellect that belongs to it. Very little 
faith ! The very foundations of Protestant faith are being, 
to-day, uprooted by the hands of Protestant clergymen. I 
would not say this if I did not know it. You have, at this 
.day, among the very finest writers in Europe, some Protestant 
clergymen, who are suspected of infidelity, from their writings. 
One of them will begin an essay by saying it is a very doubtful 
thing whether the Scriptures are the inspired Word of God, 
at all. Another will begin an essay by saying: " We admit 
the inspiration of the Scriptures ; but it only teaches a certain 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



357 



moral law. There is nothing supernatural in it — nothing 
about Almighty God or about His revelation to be based 
it." Another will say, or throw a doubt on the Divinity of 
Jesus Christ. All these things have been mooted. All these 
things have been said. My Catholic friends, you don't know 
what the Protestant world is without you. You don't know 
what a state of confusion there is there — there where the 
Anglican bishops in England have cited Protestant clergy- 
men for inlidelity ; have proved the infidelity ; and where the 
Queen, by a statute, told them they were free to exercise their 
functions, and they were free to teach the people. One of the 
very first dignitaries of the Church in England to-day — the 
dean of one of the very first cathedrals — is a man not only 
suspected, but convicted of an utter want of belief in the 
revealed Word of God. And yet he is an Anglican clergy™ 
man, high in position, grand in his position, grand in his dig- 
nity, and gets up in his pulpit every Sunday to teach the people 
the Gospel — God bless the mark [cheers] ! What follows 
from this want of faith ? 

Oh, my dear brethren and friends, wherever the mind of 
man is not thoroughly convinced — wherever man has not 
the certainty of knowledge — wherever the whole intellect is 
not filled with light, there, most assuredly, in that man's 
conduct and in that man's life, you will find the works of 
darkness, and the taint of inlidelity and impurity. The man 
who, intellectually, from want of faith, is an infidel to his 
God — that man certainly will not be faithful to that being 
that, next to God, has the deepest, and the most solemn, and 
the most sacred claim upon him ; namely, the wife of his 
bosom. From that want of faith, from that want of that 
certain conviction of all that faith teaches us, grows the 
awful impurity of this age of ours. My friends, 1 must call 
it " awful impurity." I read in the history of the world of 
great sin — great sins in past times. I read of kings rising 
up and, in the foul desires of their lustful hearts, violating 
every law. But I read in those times of the strong voice of 
the Pope of Rome, and the strong arm from the Vatican put 
out to threaten and to coerce them, if not into the path-ways 
of purity, at least into those of public decency and morality 
(cheers). I read, in the past, of great sins and great sinners ; 
but I read also that they excited the indignation of society ; 
and that the greatest sinner of them all never attempted to 
justify his sin, or to legalize it, or to obtain for it the appro- 
bation of his fellow-man, or of the laws of his country. But 
we come to this nineteenth century, and what do we find ? 



858 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



"We find the inconstancy and the infidelity of man legalized, 
acknowledged by the State, in that most infamous, most 
unchristian, most unholy law by which a man is permitted* 
by the laws of the land, to break the bond that he contracted 
in marriage before the altar of God, and to divorce the pure, 
and holy, and high-minded wife, who was the first mistress 
of his earliest love (cheers). I find in this one act, the act 
of divorce, the legislation that severs the bond that God 
has made — the legislation that tells the woman, no matter 
how pure she be, no matter how holy she be, that she is 
never secure in her position, that she is never safe from some 
base conspiracy, originating in the depravity of her husband 
anxious to be rid of her, anxious to shake off the incum- 
brance of her purity and her virtue, and trumping up an 
accusation against her — that she is never secure from the 
insidious designs and diabolical conspiracy of that man ; that 
she may not be driven forth from his house, covered with 
ruin, her name dishonored, her position lost, and not know- 
ing where to turn in her mid-career of life or in her old age 
— the abandoned, the injured, the down-trodden woman — 
because the State and the laws have given that man power 
to do it (cheers). 

I find, moreover, this demon of impurity not only destroy- 
ing the mother's hold upon her children — not only taking 
from the wife's brows that crown which God set there, who 
said to her, in matrimony, "thou shalt be this man's queen ; 
thou shalt be his partner ; thou shalt be his equal, and no 
hand shall sunder you two until the angel of death conies to 
lay one of you in the tomb ; " I find, I say, beside this iniquit- 
ous law of divorce, that this awful sin of impurity — this sense 
of a want of all responsibility before God — this feeling of per- 
fect license — has affected the young, has grown up with their 
age, has entered into their blood, has made the young boy, 
growing into manhood, think that everything was lawful for 
him, until it has become the social pest and the social evil of 
our days. I need not tell you, nor lead you into details about 
that with which, unfortunately, the press of this country has 
made us all too familiar. The dreadful sins that now and 
then turn up, creep out to terrify us, to make every modest 
woman in the land veil her face for shame, and every modest 
man feel the blood rushing to his brows, in shame and indig- 
nation ; the murders that are committed ; the foul, nameless 
crimes that are accumulated ; the awful infidelities that dis- 
grace the world in our day ; the dreadful crimes that, from 
day to day, are registered before our eyes, until it lias come 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



350 



to this that no man or woman, valuing his or her soul, can, 
with safety, take up a daily journal ; for it may contain we 
Know not what abomination ; nor do we know what abomin- 
able crime is to be put straight before our eyes ! Whence 
comes all this ? Was there ever an age — and I don't believe 
there ever was — since Christ died for man, in which this 
dreadful sin has so propagated itself as in this, our day — this 
dreadful sin — this sin that three times called down the aveng- 
ing hand of God upon man, and always with a sweeping ruin 
that destroyed a whole world, or a whole nation. It was the 
sin of defilement, or of impurity that made Almighty God, in 
the first Flood draw back the bolts of Heaven, and rain down 
on mankind that deluge of water that washed away the whole 
human race, and destroyed it. It was the self-same sin, re- 
peated, again, that made the same Almighty arm once more 
withdraw the bolts of Heaven and rain down upon Pentapolis, 
and upon the valleys by the Dead Sea, a deluge, no longer of 
water, but of fire. Living fire came forth, enkindled by the 
indignation of a God of purity, sweeping away five great 
cities, and a whole nation. It was that very same sin repeated 
again, that made the Almighty God send forth that terrible 
command to the children of Israel : " Let every man that 
fears the Lord, put his sword on his thigh, and draw it in the 
name of the God of Israel, and march through the enemy's 
country, and destroy every man in the land ! " So that a 
whole tribe, and a whole nation was wiped out of the Israeli- 
tes, because of that detestable, that fearful sin ; of which St. 
Paul speaks, when he says : " Brethren, let it not be so much 
as named among you ! " 

Well, this is the sin which to-day has assumed such pro- 
portions that it has actually lost its shame. I say it has 
lost its shame ! I say it in the face of a community which has 
been insulted, as New York was insulted on last Good Friday 
evening, while we, Catholics, were weeping at the foot of the 
Cross ; while we, Catholics, knelt there with Mary Magdalene, 
and Mary, the Virgin Mother, and the glorious friend, St. 
John, — while we, Catholics, were weeping over the feet of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, dead upon the Cross, on last Good Friday 
evening, a woman, — a woman calling herself a modest 
woman, — had a congregation — an audience — to hear her 
while she blasphemed against purity, and advocated the 
detestable principles of free and indiscriminate love ! (Sen- 
sation). Ah ! If she had been in Dublin ! [This allusion 
sent the audience into a furore.] There would not be a 
rotten egg in the city that would not have been hurled at her 



860 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



(great laughter). There would not be a herring in Pill lane 
that would not he bought up — even if they cost sixpence a 
piece — that the people might have the pleasure of shying 
them at her (renewed laughter). 

My friends, do you imagine that when I speak thus, that 
I mean the slightest reflection upon American society, or 
upon American Protestantism? Well do I know that, what- 
ever is vile, whatever is wicked, whatever is unwomanly, 
unmaidenly, or impure, is as foreign to American society as 
to any in this world (cheers). Well do I know that nowhere 
upon this earth is there an intelligence, a mind, a heart, that 
rises against all this with more bitter indignation than the 
intelligence, and the mind, and the heart of Protestant 
America (tremendous cheering). These things, and such as 
these, are a libel, not upon us Catholics, but equally on our 
respected, high-minded, pure-minded Protestant fellow-men, 
and fellow-women in the land. And I beg of you, therefore, 
to understand distinctly, that when I speak in denunciation 
of these things, I denounce them, and I denounce the bad- 
ness of our age, not only to you Catholics, but to my Amer- 
ican Protestant fellow-citizens. And, well do I know that, 
whatever is bad, or vile, that I here denounce as a priest, in 
that denounciation I shall meet the sympathy of them, the 
American Protestants, just as lively, just as pure-minded, just 
as holy in their indignation, as your sympathy, my Catholic 
fellow-citizens (tremendous cheering). 

The third great want of our age — I am ashamed to say 
it — is, as it seems to me, to be common honesty. Formerly — - 
and you hear old people speaking still of " the good old 
days" gone by, — when people were plain and simple-minded, 
it was easy to get through the world, but now, as the 
old people say, '•'everybody is so mighty sharp, and so cun- 
ning, that they are apt to turn a corner upon you!" For- 
merly, if you bought a piece of cloth to make you a suit of 
clothes, you might reasonably rely upon it; nowadays, you 
must look sharp, or you will get shoddy" (laughter). In for- 
mer times, as I heard an old man say, you could buy a pair of 
shoes, and they would last you all the winter. Nowadays 
they make them with pegs, so that when the wet weather 
comes in, in a few days they come apart (laughter). In for- 
mer days a man knew what he was going to eat ; now he 
must look mighty sharp, indeed ; his food may be adultera- 
ted, or, before he knows it, he may be half poisoned by 
what he is eating (laughter). So much for commercial 
honesty. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



361 



What shall we say of national honesty ? The international 
honesty man asks : " Have yon fifty thousand men ? " " Yes." 
"Are they drafted?" "Yes." "Well; your neighbor has 
only forty thousand ; I think you might let yours go at him !" 
"Which do you want, Presidency or Empire?" Bismarck 
said to Napoleon: "I want Alsace and Lorraine; they be- 
long to you, I know, but I want them." Napoleon said to 
Bismarck : " I want the Rhine Provinces, they belong to you, 
but I want them" So they joined issue — which of the two 
cocks would fight last. One hundred thousand men were sent 
into eternity. One hundred thousand men, the sons of mothers, 
the husbands of wives, the hope and the stay of families. One 
hundred thousand ! Enough ? No ; another two hundred 
thousand ! They were sent into eternity to decide the ques- 
tion, whether Bismarck would rob Napoleon, or Napoleon rob 
Bismarck (cheers and laughter). All my heart and soul — for 
I could not help it — were with France (great applause). I am 
an Irishman (renewed applause). And it is in the nature, and 
in the heart's-blood of a thorough-bred Irishman, as I am 
(cheers), to take off his hat and fling it in the air, and cry 
" Ho, for France !" whenever France is in the field (cheers). 
But I also know, and know it well, that the issue of that great 
war was simply an issue between Louis Napoleon and Bis- 
marck. " I want your property, and you want mine ! I want 
this, and you want it too. Let us try which of the two shall 
be the successful robber ! " Tins is international honesty, in 
this, our day. Don't you say that among all the nations they 
have the slightest regard for principle, or for treaties, or for 
right. Not the slightest ! There is Russia, She is building 
np Sebastopol again; Sebastopol that was destroyed by the 
French and the English, and which Russia swore a solemn 
oath she would, never build up again. She is going at it now* 
openly, energetically, because France is now down in the dust 
and England's hands are tied behind her back. England's 
hands are tied behind her back ! oh, that America would just 
give the knot another turn (vehement cheering). If that knet 
got another turn from America, then poor old Ireland might 
be able to stand up and let fly one blow — [The conclusion of 
the sentence was lost in a burst of cheering, but what that 
conclusion was may readily be imagined. The pantominewas 
irresistible.] 

So much for international honesty. What shall we say 
of political principle — of political honesty? We hear noth- 
ing, nowadays, but accusations against this man and that 
man; this " Ring" and that " Ring." Nothing but confusion! 
16 



CG2 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Impeachment here ; accusations there ! Take a judge one 
day and try him. The Mayor another day and try him. "So 
many thousand dollars you took !" "So many you took!" 
"So many youl" "You engaged to do such-and-such a 
thing, and got so much for it — and you did not do it! " This 
is the whole history of politics, so far as I can see it. 
Whether these accusations are true or false I cannot tell, be- 
cause I do not know the facts. Yet I believe there is some 
truth in them ; but I also believe there is a great deal of false- 
hood in them. But such is the idea that the journals of the 
day give us of political honesty. Oh, my friends, would it 
not be very pleasant if the servants who live in the house 
with us were more honest ? If we, ourselves, were more hon- 
est in our dealings with our fellow-men, commercially ? If 
the nations were more honest, and had a little more respect 
each for every other's rights ? If politicians were a little 
more honest ? Then we might go through the streets without 
being shaken to pieces by the state of the roads. These are 
the great questions involved in this branch of the subject. 

I believe, that if all men were to have a certain knowl- 
edge of divine truth — a certain knowledge — no doubt of it — ■ 
no cavilling in opinion — if we were able to talk to every 
man's mind, and say : " See here, my friend, there is the 
law; you must acknowledge it. You know it is true; you 
must act up to it." That is faith. If we had that unity of 
thought; if we were all one in the unity of one belief, if we 
all admitted the necessity of one thing, and believed it ought 
to be done—and if, in addition to that, and from that, fol- 
lowed the self-restraint, the purity of life, the integrity of 
nature preserved in the young by an absence of all these 
nameless and hideous excesses — if the fidelity of God to His 
Church w T as impersonated and typified in the grand fidelity 
of man to his wife, and of the woman to her husband ; and 
if, in addition to all this, man had a sense of his responsibil- 
ity for every relation in which he stands to his fellow-man, 
and to society; and if the morality and honesty enjoined on 
each and every one of us, so that we would not dare to be 
dishonest, because of the consequences, behold, the three 
great evils of society are healed, and the three great wants 
of society arc supplied. 

Now, I did not come here this evening, my friends, to 
point out the w T ants of society to you, I only came here to 
show you what they are — and, I think, you will acknowledge 
that, so far, I have not exaggerated. 

Now, the second part of my business this evening, here, is 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



363 



to show you that tliere is only one power upon this earth that 
is able to* meet these three wants, and supply them ; that then) 
is only one power on this earth that is able to remedy these 
three enormous evils; and she is able to do it only because 
she comes from God — and that power is the Holy Koman 
Catholic Church (loud applause). She alone can create 
faith ; and she alone, can create purity. She alone can guar- 
antee honesty. And there she alone can meet the three 
great wants of this age of ours. She alone can create faith. 
She comes to us in this nineteenth century and says: " Hear 
my voice and believe me !" If we ask her, " What right have 
you to say this to us ?" She answers : " I am the Church of 
Jesus Christ no other Church lays claim to these my attri- 
butes, except myself. I ask you to believe Him who said : 
'He that will not hear the Church, let him be as a heathen, 
or an infidel.' I ask you to believe Him who said*. 4 You 
may rely upon the Church, for I have built my Church upon 
a rock, and the gates of hell shall never prevail against it.' I 
ask you to believe my word upon the word of Him who said : 
* You may rely upon the Church that she can never teach you 
a lie. For I will send my Spirit of Truth upon her to guide 
her into all truth, and to be with her until the end of time ; 
and lo ! I, myself,' said He, ' am with her all days, until the 
consummation of the world' " [cheers]. Any man who believes 
this — who believes that these are the words of the God of 
Truth' — that man is bound, as a reasonable individual, to bow 
down before the Church and say : " Speak ! speak to me, oh, 
messenger of God ! You have proved by your diploma that 
you have come to me from God ! No other religion even puts 
in a claim to this but you. Speak, therefore, you, and I will 
hear your voice as the voice of God !" (Cheers.) What other 
religion claims it, I ask you ? Does the Protestant religion 
claim this authority, and say : " Hear me, for I come from 
God ?" No ; the boast of Protestantism is that it has removed 
that slavery of the human intellect that bound man to hear the 
voice of the Church as if it was the voice of God. In other 
words, Protestantism rests upon the principle that says to 
every man : " You are the best judge, yourself. Go ; look in 
the Book. Put your own interpretation on it : your private 
judgment is the principle of faith." Theirs is no voice that 
can say: "Hear me, for I come from God!" But if these 
words of Scripture be true, then, my friends, nothing remains 
for us but to take the W r ord as it came from the lips of the 
Church of God; and that Word is our faith. The Protestant 
will say : " Don't speak so, O friar ! Don't speak so, thou 



364 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



old bigot of the thirteenth century ! We have long forgotten 
you, and your white and black habit ! Go back to your clois- 
ter ! Go back to rot and fester in your monastic idleness and 
in your monastic garb of poverty ! We have outgrown you 
—we of the nineteenth century. We get our faith from the 
Bible — the written Word of God !" But I ask you, before you 
accept that as the foundation of your faith, does not that very 
Bible tell you that faith comes, not by reading, but by hear- 
ing ; and that hearing comes by the Word of God, spoken; 
and that the man that speaks that word must be sent by Al- 
mighty God ! (Loud cheers.) 

" F aith comes by hearing," says St. Paul, " and hearing 
by the word of God. How shall they hear without a 
preacher, and how shall any man preach unless he be sent ?" 
Therefore the man that comes to create faith must come 
with a living voice ; that voice must be the voice of author- 
ity ; and while he speaks to his fellow-man he must be able, 
with his right hand, to point to a commission received from 
God. Where is that commission to be found, save and except 
in the Catholic Church, that goes up, step by step, and year 
by year, until she says : I am here, speaking to you to-night 
by the voice of the least and most unworthy of my commis- 
sioned and sent children ; but I was present, on Easter morn- 
ing with Peter and St. John, when we entered an empty 
grave, and we heard from angels the words : ' Why seek you 
the living with the dead? He is risen. He is no longer 
here ! ' " This is the Catholic Church. She alone can create 
faith. She, alone, can give knowledge. The nations are 
groping about like children, with a film over their eyes. 
They are seeking what they are to believe. " I believe this; 
you believe that ; you are wrong, and I am right." "No; 
but I am right and you are wrong ! " [Laughter.] And in 
the midst of all this stands the living voice: the voice that 
flowed and resounded when Pie struck the key-note — and 
that was on the day when He said : " Go and preach to all 
the nations ; teach them, with loving care, all that I have 
spoken to you. And I am with you all days, even until the 
consummation of the world ! " (Cheers.) 

Does the Catholic Church create Purity? Well, my 
friends, this is a subject on which it is difficult to speak to a 
mixed audience, such as I have here this evening. And yet 
I feel bound to speak plainly and clearly to you. The Catho- 
lic Church creates purity. In what does purity consist ? My 
friends, there are two natures in man. There is the nature 
of the body — gross, material, corrupt, base, vile — of the slime 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



365 



of the earth. And there is the nature of the soul, spiritual, 
God-like, Heavenly — for it comes from Heaven — from the lips 
of God. These two natures meet in man, not as friends, but 
as enemies. They do not join hands and say : " Let us work 
together for all the eternal purposes of Him who created us." 
But the spirit says to the flesh : " I must subdue you ! " And 
the flesh says to* the spirit: "No ; but I will drag you down 
with me into hell ! " Thus it is that the two natures, the 
spiritual and the corporal, meet in man. The soul, in this 
contest with the body, has only Divine Faith — light, exam- 
ple, and grace. The body has its passions, its inclinations, its 
base desires. It has what are called, nowadays, in the blas- 
phemous jargon of the nineteenth century, " the necessities 
of its nature! " The virtue of purity is that form of divine 
grace by which the soul, the spiritual nature, the angelic ele- 
ment in man is able to assert itself, to rise into all the glory 
of its imperial power, and to say to that body, base and vile 
and earthly as it is, " No, you must not govern me ! You 
must not enslave me ! You must not have a single desire, 
nor gratify a single wish, except what I consent to ! " And 
this is purity ; the power of the soul over the body, the power 
of the intelligence and of the will over the depraved passions 
of that low, debased, and fallen nature wbich is in this flesh 
of ours. The more perfect that purity rises into the com- 
plete empire of soul over body, the more like does that virtue 
make a man unto Jesus Christ, the God of infinite purity. 
The mere perfectly the body is subdued, the more perfectly 
all its passions are annihilated, the more easily and imper- 
iously all temptations are swept out of the way, so that the 
soul may go on in its course to God, the more perfect is the 
purity of that man. And that highest form of purity is 
called " virginal purity." 

Now, my friends, in the designs of God, in creation, 
everything takes its type from something above itself. 
Everything looks to the most perfect of its species. The 
Catholic Church creates purity among the people because 
she creates a perfect type of purity in her priesthood and in 
her sanctuary (cheers). The Catholic Church says to the 
people ; "Oh, you men — oh, you husbands — be faithful, be 
pure, be self-restrained men! Look at your fellow-men in 
the sanctuary ! Look at the men who minister unto me at 
my altars ! Behold I have taken them in the bloom of their 
youth, in the strength of their manhood; and I have enabled 
them so to annihilate their passions and their bodies, that 
no thought, or shadow of a thought, to sin allied, is ever 



366 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



allowed to linger in its passage across their imaginations ; 
that no act unworthy of an angel of God is ever committed 
by them; that they are in the flesh indeed, but exalting the 
spirit over that flesh ; and therefore it is that I admit them 
to my most holy altar, because they are complete victories, 
and the embodiments of victory over their passions. There- 
fore," says the Church, "therefore, O sons of men, you can- 
not be pure in yourselves, seeing that they are pure only in 
the most perfect God" (cheers). In the purity of her priest- 
hood, in the virginal purity of her priest and monk and nun, 
the Church of God proves to the world that this high virtue 
is possible ; that it is easy and feasible to man ; and that all 
that any man has to do is to look up to Jesus Christ in 
prayer and in sacrifice and in humility, in order to obtain 
that gift of innocence and purity which is the adornment of 
the Christian soul (cheers). 

Still more, the Church of God, the Catholic Church, in 
her system of education insures the virtue of purity in the 
young. She takes the little boy or the little girl, with the 
dews of their baptismal innocence upon them, before their 
minds are open to the comprehension, or their passions 
excited to the enjoyment, of anything evil. She places them 
under the care of her preceptors, — her Christian brothers, 
her monks, her nuns ; she surrounds them with every influ- 
ence that breathes only of God, and of the Virgin, and of 
the Virgin's Son, and of the highest form of purity. She 
teaches them from their earliest infancy to look to our Divine 
Lord, and to His Virgin Mother, and to behold in both of 
them, shining forth, the gift of the infinite purity of God ; 
and she teaches them that this is the highest form of virtue. 
She infuses through the young soul the sacramental graces. 
She brings the child, — with the dews of his baptismal inno- 
cence upon him, — face to face with the Lord God in the 
Holy Communion ; and upon those innocent lips, that never 
murmured a word of evil, and into that innocent heart that 
has never thought a thought unholy, does she place her 
Divine Lord in all the strength, and in all the majesty of 
His holiness, to communicate Himself to the little one, — to 
make that little one even as He was in the happy days when, 
in In azareth, He grew up under Mary's hands. 

More, she insures domestic holiness, upon the foundation 
of domestic purity. She tells the husband and the wife that 
they are bound together by a bond upon which the Church of 
God has set her sacramental seal, and that no authority on 
earth, no power on earth, no circumstance that may arise, can 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



367 



ever destroy that "bond, or separate that husband from the 
wife. She tells that man, that, no matter what trust he may 
break, no matter what obligation he may be unfaithful to, 
there is one to which he must remain faithful to the last hour 
of his life; and that is the obligation of pure love, and of 
undivided homage to the wife of his bosom (cheers). No 
matter what circumstances may come; no matter how fortune 
may smile or frown ; " for better or worse, for richer or poorer, 
in sickness or in health, till death do them part :" and whoever 
comes in, no matter what he says, no matter w T hat he is, no 
matter how powerful a king, no matter how great the legisla- 
tor that conies in at this, that, or the other place ; no matter 
how great he may appear, the Church of God says : " Destroy 
me if you can — shed my blood if you will, but I stand between 
you and that woman ; with all the power of God, and with a 
blessing and with a curse, I stand between you and that 
woman ; and I tell you your word is null and void : she shall 
never be parted from her husband ; she shall never lose his love, 
nor his devotion, nor his homage, till death conies to part them" 
(loud cheers) ! Thus the woman is secured in her position. 
My friends, don't be angry with me if I say it ; consider if it 
be true ; if it be not true, take it as if it were not said ; but, 
if it be true, consider it well. Consider it well, Oh you ladies, 
who are present, who may not be Catholics : the only lady, 
the only wife that is perfectly secure, that can rest quietly 
without a thought, or a fear, or an anticipation of ever being 
disturbed from her sacred position of wife and of mother, is 
the woman over w^hose marriage the Catholic Church has set 
her sacramental hand and seal (cheers). She is the only queen 
that can never be dethroned ; the only empress from whose 
brow no hand can pluck the honorable and magnificent crown 
of the pure Christian wife and Christian mother (applause). 
And therefore, I hold that the Catholic Church, in her system 
of education ; in the example of her priesthood and her con- 
secrated ones ; in her teaching ; in her securing the matri- 
monial bond as the hand of God, binding two — that in all 
this, she has secured unto the world, in addition to the gift 
of faith, the magnificent gift of chastity (prolonged cheer- 
ing). 

But what about the public and private honesty ? What is 
she able to do here, you will ask. Well, my friends, there are 
two ways of dealing with a man in this respect. The first is 
to try and save a man from being a thief, if you can ; and if 
you don't succeed in making him honest get hold of him as 
soon as you can afterwards, and take whatever he foully got 



36S 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION; 



from kirn (laughter). If you can save him from being a thief 
so much the better. But the next best thing is to catch the 
thief and open his pockets, take out of them whatever was 
stolen, and give it back to the decent man that it belonged 
to. " Here, sir, this is yours. There it is. The property is 
yours. It was taken out of your house yesterday. I have 
the thief !" Now, there is no power that can do this except 
the Catholic Church. First of all, there is no power that can 
save a man from committing a theft except the power that 
masters his conscience, that lays hold of his conscience. 
That reaches him. Now, mark. You may sin against God. 
You may do a great many bad things. If you are penitent 
and sorry, you get absolution. There is an end of it. God 
Almighty forgives you freely whatever you do against Him. 
But remember, if your sin be against your neighbor, if you 
be guilty of the slightest act of thievery or injustice against 
your neighbor, Almighty God will not forgive you until you 
have given back what you have stolen. Almighty God will 
not forgive you without you make restitution. If I, for 
instance, offend God, and in the silence of my chamber I 
beseech God to pardon me, and I am afterwards sorry and 
kneel down at my confessor's knee, make a confession, tell my 
sin, express my sorrow, make my resolution that with God's 
help I will never do the like again, the priest will say, " You 
have committed a terrible sin ; you' have blasphemed God in 
your anger ; you have blasphemed the attributes of God ; you 
have invoked the devil to help you in your anger or despair ; 
but you are sorry. Now, with three words," he says, " I 
absolve thee in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 
It was a sin only against God of which you were guilty 
Whatever we are sorry for God forgives us freely. But 
whenever an offence against God involves also an offence 
against our neighbor, it becomes quite a different thing, my 
friends. 

If, in the same manner, I go to confession and say to the 
priest : " Father, I was very angry with a man, and I wanted 
to have revenge on him ; and I went to his employers and 
told them the man was a dishonest man ; and they discharged 
him ; and he has been out of work now for three weeks ; " 
the confessor will say : " Was it true or false what you told 
them ? " " Father, it was a lie ! " " And he is three weeks 
out of work now ? " " Yes." " How much was he earning a 
week ? " " Ten dollars a week." " My man," the confessor 
will say, " You will have to give that man thirty dollars ; 
and you will have to go to his employers and tell them that 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



369 



you are a liar ; that you have slandered that man unjustly." 
The man will say, perhaps : " I cannot very well do it ; I have 
only twenty dollars altogether." The priest will say : " You 
must do it, my son ; if you do not, I cannot give yon absolu- 
tion." " But, Father, you cannot ask me to go and make a 
liar of myself ? " "Tis no use, my son," the priest will an- 
swer ; " for, as you told a lie on the man before, you must go 
and tell the truth now. It is not now you will make your- 
self a liar, when you go to have him reinstated. You made 
y ourself a liar when you got the man turned out ; but until 
you get that man reinstated — until you get him back in his 
place — until you make up his character — until you make up 
his loss, you cannot go ahead here ! It's no use ! You can- 
not go to your Easter duty : I cannot let you ! " If, now, in 
addition to this, this man says that after getting his neighbor 
out of employment by saying he was a thief, he met three or 
four others and told it to them ; and they spread the story 
about the neighborhood, then the priest will say : " Well, my 
son, when you have paid the thirty dollars, and got the man 
back in his situation, there is yet another thing you must do. 
You must go about again among the neighbors, and tell them 
that what you said was all a lie ! " Why ? Because you 
have robbed that man of his reputation. This is Catholic 
duty, as enforced in the confessional ! What is there more 
likely to keep a man honest than the perfect knowledge that 
he cannot be a thief ? If a man could say, " I will rob my 
employer of a thousand dollars, taking twenty at a time, and 
he will not miss it ; afterwards I will lead a good life ; I will 
do penance before God ; I will become an elder in the Church ; 
and I will preach on Sundays, sometimes, myself. Besides, 
nobody will miss it, and nobody will be the worse for it ; — if 
a man could say that, what a strong temptation would it not 
be to take it ? But the Catholic cannot do it. 

I remember, since I came to America, hearing of a man 
who came to a Catholic, somewhere down South, and made 
this propo; -al : " You will vote for me, you know ; and I will 
vote for you, you know ; and we will take that twelve hun- 
dred and divide it between us." " Well," said the other, I 
cannot do that, but I'll tell you what I will do. If you give 
me the thousand I will let you have the two hundred. For I 
can tell you," said he, " that sooner or later I must make res- 
titution, because I am a Catholic; but you will have the two 
hundred scott-free. You have no restitution to make ! " 
[Laughter and applause]. Who is it that catches the thief ?" 
Why, for one thief the State lay holds of, a thousand thieves 
16* 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



escape. For every one man that the State lays hold of and 
brings to trial for robbery or corruption, how many are never 
detected, or, if detected, elude justice? The money is all 
gone, and all the courts can do is to send the offender to the 
penitentiary, or put him on the tread-mill. But that will not 
get back one penny of the money. The Catholic Church 
alone lays hold of the thief ; she catches him in the Confes- 
sional. " How much did you take ? " " Twenty thousand." 
" Then you have to give back every penny of it." The Cath- 
olic Church alone so lays hold of the thief that it enables those 
who were plundered to get their own again. Perhaps you 
say this is never done ? I deny it. I say it is within my own 
knowledge. I can say this, and I am free to say this, and I 
have got permission to say it ; it is within my own knowl- 
edge, and was under my own agency. Within twelve months 
since I left Ireland, I paid twenty thousand pounds ster- 
ling — $100,000 — in restitution. (Cheers.) Who catches the 
thief? Why, this is well known in England; and, I be- 
lieve, in this country. A great many Protestant families 
have Catholic servants, because they know, they cannot steal 
from them (applause). When I was living in Gloucestershire, 
on the mission, there was a Protestant clergyman came to me, 
and he said : " I want you to come to my house " — (he was 
an Englishman) — " I want you to come to my house. My 
man — my man-servant — has been two months away from con- 
fession, and I am very uneasy about it." I said to him, 
"Why, bless my soul! you are a Protestant minister, and you 
repudiate the doctrine of the Confessional. Do you really 
make your servants go to confession ? " " Of course I do," 
he said ; " and of course you know — ahem — if I did not make 
him go to confession, how do I know but he might be stealing, 
you know ? " This is the Catholic Church ; the reality of re- 
ligion. 

I cannot help feeling indignant — I cannot help feeling in- 
dignant from the very love I have for my fellow-men, for the 
very love I have for this glorious land, where I would very 
willingly spend the rest of my life, if I were only allowed — 
(here the assemblage burst into a perfect storm of cheering) 
— I cannot help feeling indignant whenever I see an unreal 
thing, a sham, held up and called by the name of " religion." 
Why, religion, wherever it is, if it be true, must get into a 
man's soul, must make him a pure man, must make him an 
honest man. It must make him an humble man, believing in 
God with all his heart and soul, leaning upon Christ, his Sa- 
viour, with all his heart and soul — not clinging to any other 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



371 



name or any other power save that of Jesus Christ, the Son 
of God, his Saviour. But, in clinging to Him by Faith, he 
must also approach Him with pure hands. With pure hands! 
Oh, God ! Oh, God ! to hear them speak ! — speaking of 
" hanging on to the Lord." Of " grasping the Lord ; " of 
"laying hold of the Saviour," and their hands not pure! 
Would the Virgin's Son alloAV the impure man to approach 
him ? No ; that man is the worst blasphemer who would 
speak of Christ with impure lips, or speak of touching Him 
unless his hands are pure. Religion, wherever it is, must en- 
ter into man's life in his relations with his fellow-man, must 
create in him a sense, a constant abiding sense of his respon- 
sibility to God and to his fellow-man. Consequently it must 
make him "as honest as the sun," as we say in Ireland. 
And if it do not do this it is no religion. 

Now, my Catholic friends, one word and I have done, for 
I greatly fear I have trespassed on your patience (cries of 
" No, no "). The citizens of America may well say to me, 
and to the like of me, " This is all very beautiful in theory, 
but is it so in practice among your people ? Are your peo- 
ple — are you, that are always boasting about being an Irish- 
man, throwing up your hands about Ireland, talking about 
Irish glory, and all that — are your fellow-countrymen in this 
country the pure, honest men that you speak of ? I answer, 
if they are true Catholics they are all that I describe them to 
be (cheers). I am not describing bad Catholics. But I say 
to every man that speaks to me, either as an Irishman or as a 
priest — I say if, as Irishmen, they are true to their country's 
traditions, they are all that I describe them to be (cheers). 
And, as a Catholic priest, I say if they are true to their 
religion they are all, my friends, that I describe them to be 
(cheers). What remains ? What remains, men of Ireland — 
men of the Catholic Church ? What remains but for you 
and me to be what we ought to be [cheers] ? For you and 
ine to be what our forefathers before us were — the cream of 
the earth ! The light of the world was ancient Ireland ! 
The joy of Christendom was ancient Ireland ! The glory of 
the Catholic Church was ancient Ireland ! What remains but 
for us to be what our fathers before us were so faithfully in the 
days of joy or of sorrow [cheers] ? What remains for me to 
be, but all that the Catholic Church tells me I ought to be, 
and all that Ireland's history tells me the monks and priests 
of Ireland's history were ? What, remains for me but — as a 
Catholic — the laws of my Church ; and, as an Irishman, the 
grand example of St. Columbanus, St. Patrick, and St. Kevin 



372 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



(cheers). And if you, and I, and all the Irish Catholics in 
this land, are only what our religion commands us to be, or 
supposes us to be, and I will add — and this is the great point 
— enables us to be, if we only accept her ministration and 
her sacraments — if we are only that, then shall we be worthy 
of the esteem and love of our American fellow-citizens 
(loud cheers). Why do I speak of them ? Because, Irish- 
men and Catholics, whom I am addressing, let me tell you 
that I have lived in many lands, and I have known many 
people, and I am not accustomed, (thanks be to God — and I 
hope I never will be) — to speak words of flattery or idle speech 
to any people. I speak the truth as I feel it. I speak it as it 
fits in my mind before the world. I say to them, as I am 
upon this topic, as far as my experience leads me, if there is 
a man upon this earth whose love and whose good-will I have 
the ambition to possess, he is an American citizen (cheers). 
If you and I are what our religion and what our history tells 
us we ought to be, America will have no loss, but a great 
gain in us. America, the grand and glorious young country 
that has never yet violated the traditions of her own freedom, 
that has never yet denied to the poor emigrant, and to the 
stranger, and to the hunted head, the liberty and the share in 
that liberty which she herself enjoyed (cheers), — to be a citi- 
zen of America, to be destined, either in yourselves or in your 
children after yon, to guide her councils and enter into the 
halls of her glorious Legislature, to be citizens of America — 
that is to say, in a few years to shape the destinies of the 
world and give laws to all the nations — laws founded on jus- 
tice, on religion, and on God — this I hold is the highest ambi- 
tion that can enter into the mind of man in this nineteenth 
century (cheers). The country that has given you a home will 
give you power and intelligence. The nation that has opened 
her arms to receive you will lift you up in those strong arms 
to the full height and the highest place ; for no mean, misera- 
ble, petty bigotry, no miserable restriction of race or religion 
fetters the mind of the free man here (cheers). 

This, and all this, will this glorious America do for us, if 
we, Catholics and Irishmen, and the sons of Irishmen, are all 
that Catholicity teaches us to be, and all that our history 
points out to us in the traditions of our glorious past. Great 
will be America's gain in the day when the Irish element in 
America, taking shape and form, brings to bear upon her 
councils the magnificent intellect of Ireland, bringing into 
her battle-fields the strong, brave, and stalwart arms that 
were never yet idle when a blow was to be struck for freedom 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



373 



(cheers). Great will be America's gain, all this secured to 
her by Irish fidelity and Irish love for the land of their adop- 
tion. Great will be America's gain when her sanctuaries and 
shrines continue to be adorned — as they are adorned to-day 
— by that Irish priesthood that has come to this land with 
the traditions of fifteen hundred years of martyrdom and of 
sanctity about it (cheers). Great, indeed, will be this nation's 
future history (cheers). I see her as she rises before me, 
magnificent in every proportion of intellectual and material 
strength ; I see her combining the best resources of every 
land and of every country. In her right arm, outstretched 
in the moment of her highest power and energy, I see the 
energy, the might, the patriotism and the fidelity of Ireland 
(loud cheers). You remain, but I will leave you ; and, if 
God gives me life, I will yet, perhaps with tears of joy in my 
eyes, see the green hills of Innisfail rise before me. Oh, my 
friends, let me bring home with me the message to the sons 
of Ireland, of the Clan-na-Gael — from those who love the old 
land to those who love you there, — let me bring home the 
consoling message to them, that Ireland in America is worthy 
of its new land ; but that Ireland in America has not forgot- 
ten the old land ; that the heart of Ireland beats throbbing 
in all the energy of youth for the glorious future that is before 
it in America ; and still looks back and beholds in the light 
of memory, across the waves the ever loved and ever dear 
green land of the saints and of our sires (great cheering). 
Then, my friends, the ancient land, my home, will look with 
hopeful eyes across the wild Atlantic to the great continent 
that is here ; and whenever an enemy assails her ; whenever 
an old tyrant comes to hang an old chain upon her, Ireland 
will rise up, indignant in her strength, and say : " Oh tyrant ! 
Oh oppressor ! remember I have strong sons over the ocean 
who will strike a blow for me (cheers) ! I am not abandoned. 
I am not all- forsaken, though in my old age. I am the mother 
of the strong race, the intellectual race, the powerful race, 
that, some day or other will bring the mighty energies of the 
* Great Country ' to bear upon, to crush — aye, and to trample 
into the dust the foul hand that was ever raised to strike 
dear old Ireland!" (Loud and prolonged cheering, amid 
which the Rev. lecturer retired). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in St Patrick's 
Cathedral, Newark, on Monday evening, June 3, for the benefit of the 
public hospital erected by the Catholics of that city, and placed under 
the care and management of the " Sisters of the Poor."j 



" CHRISTIAN CHARITY." 



Dear Friends : — Among the many proofs that the Catho- 
lic Church offers to the world of her truth and of her divine 
mission, one of the strongest — though an indirect proof still 
one of the strongest — is the spirit of charity and mercy that 
is organized within her. It had been prophesied of the Spouse 
of old, that the Lord God had organized charity in her 
(Dominus et rex mens ordinavit in me caritatem). It had 
been foretold by Christ our Lord, and emphatically, that the 
attribute of charity — of mercy — was to be the countersign of 
his elect. It was therefore fitting that the Church, which was 
the spouse of Jesus Christ, should have an organized charity 
and mercy within her, and that they should shine forth on her 
hands, as the countersign of her election, who was destined 
to be the mother of all the elect of God. Therefore it is, that 
at all times, charity, taking the form of mercy, has been found 
vivid and true in the Catholic Church ; and that charity which 
beams forth in her comes before us, when we contemplate her, 
with all the attributes of Divine beauty which we find in the 
charity of Jesus Christ Himself. You know that I am come 
before you this evening to speak to you of the attributes of 
Christian charity. It is not so much of the necessity of char- 
ity that I wish to speak, but it is of the attributes of charity. 
I need not speak to you of the necessity of being charitable 
and merciful. Your presence here this evening attests suffi- 
ciently to me that you recognize the necessity of charity. Bat 
that you may know what that Divine charity is which is in 
the Church, and which takes the form of mercy, I will endeav- 
or to describe to you some of its attributes ; and I will begin 
by asking you, in the language of scripture, to consider and 
to recognize what form of charity it is that the Father in 
Heaven bestowed upon us whereby we also were to be called, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



375 



- — and were to be, — the sons of God. That form of the Fath- 
er's love is Christ Jesus our Lord : for as Christ Himself says, 
" God so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son to 
save it." Behold the Father's gift ! If you would know 
therefore, what are the true attributes and what the real beau- 
ties of charity, you must consider charity as it exists in our 
Divine Lord Himself. Then shall you see what are the attri- 
butes of Christian charity. Therefore the Evangelist said, 
u Brethren, consider well the nature and the form of love the 
Father in Heaven bestowed upon us, whereby we are to be 
called the sons of God." 

"Well, first of all, my clear friends, certain it is that 
although faith be absolutely necessary to salvation, and 
although we are saved by hope ; yet neither faith nor hope 
will bear us into our everlasting happiness and joy hereafter, 
unless we possess charity which manifests itself in mercy to 
the poor. "By this," says our Divine Lord " shall all men 
know that ye are my disciples, "if you are charitable and 
love one another;" and " if any man says he loveth God and 
loveth not his neighbor, he is not a true believer." But, 
elsewhere, the same Evangelist tells us that " He who has 
the substance of this world and seeth his brother have need 
and closes his heart against him, the love of God cannot 
dwell in such a one." Therefore the sign by which we shall 
know the essential charity is in us, is the manifestation of 
this Divine principle in works of mercy. The prophet said, 
" I will espouse thee to me in faith, in justice, in judgment 
and commiseration." So much for the necessity of char- 
ity. No man can be saved without it. No man can 
say he is the son of God unless the countersign of mercy 
be upon him. No man can pass into Heaven unless 
he opens the golden gates of that heaven to himself with 
the key of mercy. It will be the crucial test whereby 
you shall be found deserving of eternal glory that the coun- 
tersign of mercy is on your forehead and the works of charity 
are in your path. 

What manner of charity do we find in our Lord J esuk 
Christ ? What are the attributes of His charity ? I answer, 
principally four. First of all, the charity in Christ was a 
constant and abiding charity ; secondly, it was compassionate 
and tender — a most loving charity ; thirdly, it was active 
and efficacious — a working charity ; fourthly, it was univer- 
sal, embracing all and touching all with the same loving 
hand — a catholic charity. Consider these four in Christ 
before we come to look upon them in the charity organized 



376 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



in His Holy Church. First, my friends, the charity of otvf 
Divine Lord was constant. It was love that brought Him 
down from heaven ; it was mercy that kept Him upon the 
earth for thirty-three years ; it was mercy that nailed Him 
to the Cross. He came down from heaven to redeem the 
fallen race of man. He devoted Himself wholly to that 
work of redemption. No other thought ever entered into 
the mind of our Lord ; no other motive pressed Him to action 
— save the one thought, the one motive of mercy. It was 
His daily action. When He spoke it was the mercy of light 
given to man ; when He healed their sick, it was still the 
mercy His all-powerful touch brought upon them. Thirty- 
three years He remained upon earth. Was that necessary 
for man's salvation ? No! But it was necessary that Christ 
should have a time to pour forth His infinite mercy in His 
daily actions on the people. They came to Him at all times. 
When He was at meat they rushed into Him, just as Mary 
Magdalen rushed to His feet as He sat at table. They came 
to Him at the time when He was supposed to take His rest, 
just as jSTicodemus came " at the midnight hour." They 
pressed upon Him, so that St. Mark says they did not even 
give Him time to eat bread — to eat His meals. And did He 
ever refuse Himself to them ? Did He ever turn away from 
them and say "this is not the time or the place for you to 
seek me ? " Did He ever show the slightest inconstancy or 
uncertainty in His mercy ? No ! No matter who came to 
Him, or at what time or place, or under what circumstances, 
He was always equal to Himself. That charity, that mercy 
with which He met them was the business of His life, until 
the people came to count with absolute certainty upon the 
abiding constancy of His love, and came to Him with the 
sick and their blind and their palsied and their dead, per 
fectly certain that His charity and mercy would go fortn 
from Him, because, in truth, that was the very life of God ; 
this love which was not an exceptional or occasional work 
with Him — not merely the recreation of an hour — it was the 
business of His life; it was His very life itself. He brought 
to the work of mercy the infinite constancy of God. 

Not only, however was the charity of Christ constant ; but 
it was also a most tender and compassionate form of love. 
Dearly beloved brethren, here it is that we get a glimpse into 
the inner heart of our Lord. Here it is that we contemplate 
the virtue of charity, of mercy in Him. Here it is that we 
see the infinite compassion and tenderness of His most loving 
heart. He invariably surrounds each act of His mercy with 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



377 



every sweetest attribute of tenderness and love. For instance 
when upon the mountain, He had five thousand people around 
Him, and He resolved to feed them; but before He multiplied 
the bread, He turned to his disciples and said, " I have com- 
passion upon this multitude, and I will not send them away 
fasting lest they might faint by the way ; for lo ! they have 
remained with me three days." Kot content with feeding 
them, he prefaces the action of mercy with the expression of 
compassion, giving vent, as it were, to the strong feeling of a 
loving heart. Then when He was entering the city of Nain 
a funeral procession came forth ; a young man, the only son 
of a widow, — who had lost him in her old age, and now, with 
dishevelled hair and streaming eyes, and with the loud outcry 
of despair, she mourned that the staff of her life was gone — 
and the hope and joy of her life taken from her, as she follow- 
ed her only child to the grave. But the moment her voice 
fell upon the Saviour's ear — when He saw her, He was touched 
with pity. The fountains of His great, glorious, loving heart 
were moved within Him; and He goes to the woman and lays 
His hand upon her shoulder and says to her in accents of thrill- 
ing love : "Woman weep no more." He dries the mother's 
tears, and then turning to the man on the bier, He says — 
" Young man, I say unto thee, arise." And the Evangelist 
tells us, that when the young man awoke, our Lord took him 
in His hands and gave him to his mother — placed him upon 
her bosom, and then stood by and feasted His great compas- 
sion and the tenderness of his love on the happiness of that 
meeting. Such was the heart of Jesus Christ. 

On another occasion, He comes to Bethany. Lazarus was 
dead four days, and in his grave, when the Master appeared. 
And they went into the house and told Mary the Magdalen 
that the Master was come, and she rushed out and flung her- 
self heart-broken at His feet — exclaiming " Oh, my Lord ! if 
Thou had been here my brother never would have died 
"When He looked down and saw this woman weeping — th. 
great sobs bursting from her breast in the agony of gric, 
Jesus also wept. Tears came from His eyes and fell upon the 
head of Mary from the fountain of that Divine love and com- 
passion. There is nothing more touching in all Scripture than 
those words, " Jesus wept." The very Jews who stood around 
were amazed to see the compassion of the man. They were 
not used to such grief, and they said to one another, " Be- 
hold ! He weeps — see how much He loved him." Such was 
the heart of Jesus Christ. He used to heal the wounded 
feelings of the afflicted, as well as to relieve them; and en- 



3 18 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

tered into all their wants and ministered to them, while He 
ministered with so much love that the manner in which He 
relieved was almost greater than the relief itself. Thirdly, 
the charity of our Lord was a magnificent, real, active and 
efficacious charity. He did not love in word and thought 
merely ; He loved in deed and truth. He does not content 
Himself with saying, "I have compassion on the multitude; * 
but He puts His hand into the basket and takes the bread and 
breaks it, and multiplies it, and gives it unto them until every 
one is filled. He does not content Himself with saying to 
the widowed mother, "Weep no more ; " but He gives her a 
reason to cease her weeping, for He raises her son from the 
dead and puts him upon her bosom. He does not content 
Himself with weeping over the Magdalen and saying to her, 
" I am the Resurrection and the Life; " but the next moment 
sees Him at the tomb of Lazarus, and the darkness of the 
grave hears a voice — "Lazarus, come forth" — and Lazarus 
did come forth out of his grave; and He gave him unto his 
sisters. His was a mercy that never tired; a mercy that met 
every form of misery, for it was not only constant and gentle 
and compassionate, or efficacious and active; but it was also 
catholic and universal. Every form of misery which came 
before Him was met by Him. Now, we find Him opening 
the eyes of the blind ; again, we find Him lifting up the help- 
less and the lame; again, He is cleansing the leper or raising 
the dead ; at another time confounding the pride of the Phar- 
isees, by the example of His humility ; at another time — the 
greatest work of all — when He received the sinner with all 
her sins upon her, and in these words, " Thy sins are for- 
given." He sent her forth pure as an angel before the Throne 
of God. 

These are the four principal attributes of that charity 
which existed in the heart of Jesus Christ. When Christ, our 
Lord established His Church, He expressly declares to us that 
He founded her in all strength, in all beauty, in all holiness 
and truth. He expressly declares to us that whatever He 
had He gave to His Church ; that whatever He was His 
Church was to be. It has been written of that Church. 
"Thou wast made exceedingly beautiful because of my 
beauty that was upon thee," by the Prophet Isaias. Christ 
we find fulfilling this when He said to His disciples, " Al 
Lleaven and earth is given to me ; and now I say to you, a*, 
the Father sent me so do I send you ; as I am the true light 
that enlighteneth all that come into the world, so are ye sent 
to spread that light; and the gates of hell shall never prevail 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



379 



against that Church, as I am the Omnipotent of God, having 
power to forgive sins ; so I say to you whose sins you shall 
forgive shall be forgiven them." 

But amongst the many gifts He bestowed upon His 
Church He gave her that charity and mercy which we have 
just seen was so perfect in the heart of our Lord. Therefore, 
as St. Paul tells us, Christ loved His Church, and gave His 
life that He might present her to Himself perfect, beautiful, 
glorious, not Laving spot, wrinkle, stain, nor any, such thing, 
but all perfect in her supernatural beauty; and so, wholly to 
be the spouse of Jesus Christ the Son of God. Among 
these beauties was the beauty of charity like His own, 
because it is written, " I will espouse thee in faith, in justice, 
in judgment, and. in mercy and commisseration." How, 
therefore, can mercy and charity not be a distinctive of that 
Church which was to be the bride of Christ. So, therefore, 
when we go back to her history, we must find upon her 
records that attribute of charity like to His. Do we find it ? 
Oh, my dear friends, mercy and charity were unknown to the 
world until Jesus Christ founded His Church — mercy and 
charity were unknown to the world. The world had benevo- 
lence ; the record of the world's history tells us of many acts 
of grand benevolence performed, now and then, by the 
Pagans of old ; we are told of many instances in which they 
showed tenderness of heart and commiseration, and of many 
in which they were generous and self-sacrificing in their 
efforts to befriend their fellow-men. Remember all these are 
fair and beautiful adornments of the natural character of 
man. But they are not supernatural ; they are not Divine ; 
nor are they the mercy which Jesus Christ shall require of 
the soul which enters into the kingdom of His bliss. Why ? 
Because, my beloved, the charity of which Jesus Christ our 
Lord speaks is a charity which must spring from faith and be 
animated by hope ; which must spring from faith because, as 
the Apostle says, " And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, 
these three ; but the greatest of these is charity." Unless 
faith be there pointing out the way of all our charity, it may 
be gentleness, it may be kindness of heart, it may be what 
you will, but it is not Christian charity. What does faith 
tell us to guide our charity ? Our faith tells us that we are 
bound to minister to Jesus Christ our Lord ; to do homage 
to Him, no matter in what disguise or form we find Him. 
Our faith teaches us that blessed are they that minister to 
Him, for they shall be ministered to by Him. 

Now where shall we find Him so that our ministration 



sso 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



will reach Him ? In Heaven He commands our adoration ; 
but we cannot minister to Him in our mercy. In the blessed 
Eucharist He commands purity of soul, a fervent approach, 
adoration; but we cannot minister to Him in our mercy. 
There is one form — one and only one — in which Christ our 
Lord presents Himself so that He becomes an object of 
mercy, and that is when He disguises Himself in the form of 
the poor and needy; and then I say unto you inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of these little ones ye have done it unto 
Him. And in the day of judgment He shall say to the souls 
of the just: "I was hungry and ye broke your bread and 
gave me to eat; I was naked and ye clothed me; I was sick 
and ye lifted up my head and visited me." And when the 
just shall say, " Where, oh Lord! did we see thee hungry and 
feed Thee, or poor and relieved Thee ? " Then the Lord 
shall say to the soul of the just one: "Dost thou recognize 
these ? " " Oh, yes Lord ! I know them. I saw them on 
earth famishing, dying, sick, and in their misery." Then He 
will say: "I swear to you that whatsoever you did to these, 
you did it to me." 

Behold then what faith teaches us. Faith establishes this 
principle, — that in serving the poor we minister unto Jesus 
Christ ; — that in ministering to the poor we are working out 
OY.r own salvation, for our salvation depends on working out 
Jesus Christ within us. What does our hope tell us concern- 
ing this work of mercy ? Our hope tells us that every prom- 
ise that Aliuighty God has made of future glory and bliss to 
man is all bound up with the condition of mercy. What do 
you hope for ? Pardon for your sins ; the highest mercy of 
God. God tells us in the scripture, " Redeem your sins by 
alms, and cover your iniquity by mercy to the poor." Do you 
look forward to eternal light and glory ? Isaias says, " Deal 
thy bread to the hungry, and bring the harborless into thy 
house. When thou seest one naked, cover him ; and despise 
not thine own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth in the 
darkness : then shall thy justice go before thy face, and the 
Lord shall fill thy soul with brightness and give thee ever- 
lasting rest." What wonder, then, that when the very point 
to which every Christian man is tending — namely the moment 
of judgment — when every Christian man is asking himself, 
" Shall I pass through that golden gate, into the inner glory 
of God, or shall I be cast away into the flames , of hell 
forever ? " Oh awful moment ! Oh fearful question ! Yet, 
in the moment when our fate shall hang in that balance which 
lies before us all ; which no man can escape, in that terrible 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



381 



ordeal which every man among us must pass through, our 
Lord will say, " Show me your mercy. You wish to pass 
into my glory : show me how you have purchased it by works 
of mercy to the poor. I was hungry and you gave me not 
to eat ; thirsty and you gave me not to drink ; sick and you 
would not visit me nor comfort me ; for as often as you have 
refused this unto the poor you have refused it unto me. De- 
part now thou accursed unto everlasting flames." Oh ! how 
sacred is the exercise of that charity and mercy the moment 
we see it through the eyes of faith and hope ; and unless it is 
thus seen through the eyes of faith and hope, it may be a 
human virtue, but it is not the divine virtue of charity. 

Now this virtue, exalted and divine, do we find in the very 
first days of the Church. She alone could create this charity 
of which I speak. And why ? Because she alone has the 
knowledge of Jesus Christy — she alone can recognize Him, — - 
she alone has the commission to preach His word and to evan- 
gelize His name unto the nations, she alone has the treasure 
surpassing all others, of His own divine presence in her bosom. 
Therefore, she alone can create the virtue which acknowl- 
edges the claims of Him in the poor, and strains to serve Him 
through them. From the first days of the Church's existence 
do we find that mercy shining upon her. During the first 
300 years of the Church's existence, when to be a Catholic 
meant to be sentenced to death ; when Christians were obliged 
to hide in the catacombs and tomb, — for to show themselves 
was to accept instant destruction — even then, the record of 
the Church tells us, whenever some great Roman was con- 
verted or whenever some great family of Rome received the 
light, the very first thing they did — the first impulse of their 
new religion — was to call an auction and dispose of every- 
thing that they had ; and then, when the money was lying 
before them in great heaps of gold and silver, to call in the 
poor and distribute it all to them. When St. Laurence was 
in his dungeon awaiting death, they told the Roman Governor 
that he was a deacon of the Christian Church, and held all 
the immense riches which it was whispered that they had 
hidden. They lied in that day about the priests of the Church 
just as we hear their lies now, and say that we priests are 
always trying to get the people's money. When the governor 
heard this, he called his prisoner and said to him, " Tell me. 
Is it true that this Christian Church to which you belong 
possesses such great treasures ? " " Perfectly true." " Then," 
he said, " I will give you your life on one condition : that 
you bring all the treasures of that Church and hand them to 



382 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



me." St. Laurence went out and gathered all the blind and 
the lame and the wretched and the poor and the sick, and 
brought them all, hundreds of them, before the palace gate, 
so that when the governor came down, anxious to gloat over 
the stores of gold and silver and precious stones which he 
looked for, he saw only this multitude. And when he asked 
St. Laurence where was this treasure, the deacon answered, 
" Behold ! These, O Prsetor, are the treasures, and the 
only treasures of the Church of Jesus Christ." In her alone 
we find charity organized in a constant form. 

You have seen that mercy was the life of Christ — not an 
occasional thing with him but the duty and business of every 
day of His life — the only thing for which he lived. Where, 
except in the Catholic Church, do you find lives consecrated, 
from youth to age consecrated, to the one work of mercy ? 
Outside the Catholic Church you find a great deal of benevo 
lence, kindness of heart, good nature, a great deal of compas- 
sion and gentleness for the poor. But there is this difference. 
No one except in the Catholic Church has this mercy and 
charity — the sign and seal of her union with Jesus Christ. 
The Protestant lady who wishes to visit the sick, takes her 
basket upon her arm, puts a bottle of wine in it, and goes on 
her errand. She does a good thing, a holy thing ; yet remem- 
ber, she will do it to-clay ; — but to-morrow ? To-morrow it 
may rain,, and the delicate lady will stay at home. ' She will 
do it to-clay 9 — she is in a good humor, — in the vein of piety ; 
but to-morrow she may have a sick headache and not feel like 
it ; or perhaps yesterday some whom she visited seemed to 
her ungrateful ; or perhaps they were dirty ; and so she has 
given it up ; or she may have household duties, or visits to 
pay, and of course she cannot be expected to give her whole 
time to the poor. But, cross the threshold of the Catholic 
Church. The moment you have passed it, the very first figure 
you see is that of the Sister of Charity, or the Sister of 
Mercy, or the Sister of the Poor. You ask the priest who 
these are, and he answers : " These are ladies — many of them 
ladies of birth — ladies of the most refined mind — of the most 
cultivated and highly educated intelligence ; ladies, as you 
perceive by their demeanor, by their walk, — ladies, who had 
alt the pleasures and joys of life before them ; bat, at fifteen 
or sixteen years of age, consecrated themselves to the Church. 
They brought to that Church their purity, their virtue, their 
nobility of intellect, their refinement of manner, brought 
everything to the Church and said, " I want to consecrate all 
these to the service of the Church." The Church of God 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



383 



eays, " Are you willing to devote your whole life, for I won't 
accept it for a day, or a year ? " And they answered, " Yes." 
Then the Church says, " Go into a convent, fast and pray ; 
satisfy me of your heroic virtue ; and, when I am satisfied 
that you are one of God's elect, — most holy ones, — then, and 
then only, you may go into the hospital, or the orphanage, 
or the workhouse, there to sit down for the rest of your lives." 
To the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity she says, 
"Take the sick, nurse them, perform for them every most me- 
oial office, be their servants, be their slaves, their attendants, 
their nurses, every day until the end of your life ; but I will 
not give you the mission of honor until you have consecrated 
yourselves to God." And in that consecration the Church 
warns them : " Remember, no matter how hideous the disease, 
— no matter how revolting the form of infirmity, no matter how 
certain the contagion and death you bring upon yourself, you 
must swear to me, at the foot of my altar, that no form of dis- 
ease, danger, or contagion— no sacrifice of your own feelings or 
tastes, — shall ever keep you for one instant from your post 
of labor." This is charity as it is in the Church. We can 
rely upon it, we can lean upon it, as they leaned upon the 
Divine mercy and charity of Jesus Christ, for it is constant, 
Consider the thousands that are growing into the maturity of 
their age under these vows, in these ministrations. Consider 
the thousands of consecrated ones in the Church who are 
ripening into that old age which brings reverence and silver 
hair. For all these there is no thought but mercy. All their 
hopes for life and eternity are bound up in the sick and the 
poor. Moreover, the charity which manifests itself in the 
Church is like to that of our Divine Lord in its tenderness and 
gentleness. How could the Church be other than gentle, ten- 
der, loving and compassionate in her mercy, seeing what the 
motive is ; she recognizes the Lord in the poor, and therefore 
in ministering to them, ministers as if it were to Jesus 
Christ. 

My dear friends, when the world deals out its wealth to 
the poor, it deals it with a grudging and imperious hand. 
When the political congress or the statesmen make up their 
minds to build a county house, or place of refuge for the 
poor, they make it as like a jail as possible. The poor man 
is brought in and made to feel that he is a pauper. He is 
made almost to forget his name ; for he takes his number : he 
is known only by that. He receives his subsistence, and, 
under the poor-law system in England and Ireland, the same 
class of clothing as the convicts — the same pattern. If he be 



384 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



a married man, he is separated from his wife ; if he be a 
father he is separated from his children ; — yes, even the mother 
is separated from her children, who are taken from her and 
put into the children's ward, numbered and ticketed as a 
man would ticket cattle. So, while their life is prolonged, 
they have the pauper's rag to cover them, and the pauper's 
morsel to keep life in them ; but their feelings are crushed, 
and they are made to feel that they are dependent on the 
charity of a world which longs for the time when all will be 
over. Oh ! the suffering, the feeling of utter degradation that 
must come over the man or woman who is obliged to have 
recourse to its assistance, knowing that those who minister to 
them are waiting with impatience for the time to come when 
the parish will be relieved of a pauper, when a pauper's coffin 
shall enshrine him, and he shall be borne to a pauper's grave! 
No hope, no solace, no tenderness, no sympathy ; the heart is 
broken while the life is prolonged. Well do I remember 
many such instances of the state of feeling of our people with 
regard to this system ; but I remember once being called to 
assist in Dublin a woman who was dying. I climbed up to 
the wretched garret, and found her lying upon the bare floor, 
with not even a little straw under her head, and no covering 
save the rags she was accustomed to wear and walk about in. 
The woman was past seventy years of age, and, in her youth, 
had been well educated, of respectable parents, and in com* 
fortable — almost wealthy — circumstances. Her children had 
dropped off, or emigrated, one by one, until, at last, this old 
woman was left alone ; and I found her lying there, with fever 
in her veins, dying of starvation and hunger. She was not 
able to speak to me when I entered, and I had to lie down 
on the floor to receive her confession. So utter was her des- 
titution, that I protest I had to go out and look among the 
neighbors to get a cup of water to wet her lips. Seeing her 
in such suffering, and finding myself unable to relieve her, I 
ventured to suggest to her, " You have no one to take charge 
of you, and you are dying ; would it not be better to let me 
have you taken to the workhouse hospital ? " She looked at 
me, nor will I ever forget that look. " I sent for a priest, 
and, great God," she said, " has he no consolation to offer me 
but this ! No, father : take back that word ! " I was obliged 
to take it back, and to beg her pardon for having used it. 
" No ; I can die here of hunger, without being degraded." 

Now, pass again into the Catholic Church. She selects 
the best, the tenderest, the purest, the holiest of her children, 
and gives them the mission to minister to the poor. The gen- 



THE CATHOLIC MISS. ON. 385 

tlest hand : the heart filled with the tenderness of virgin love 
for Jesus Christ ; the heart that has never been contracted by 
one voluntary emotion of self-love ; those who are of all oth- 
ers most calculated to condole while relieving ; to bind up 
the wounds of the heart while they raise the languid head. 
If yoa or I to-morrow were stricken down and afflicted, from 
what iips should we wish to hear the words of consolation and 
of hope, but from the lips of the consecrated ones of Jesus 
Christ ? Where could we find a hand more fitted to wipe 
away the tear upon our faces than the hand locked in the 
spiritual nuptial of Jesus Christ ? If we wanted to lean upon 
the sympathy and love of a fellow-creature, where will we 
find a heart more capable of relieving that want than tho 
heart that is empty of all love, save the one love of Jesus 
Christ ? Oh ! my dear friends, you have only to go into any 
House of Mercy or of Charity, or any hospital, or to the Sis- 
ters of the Poor, to fin4 this true Christian mercy. JSTever 
will I forget, some few years ago, when I was on the mission 
in Manchester, I went out to see the public buildings, and 
found among them a house of the Little Sisters of the Poor. 
They took in aged people, who suffered from incurable dis- 
eases ; — those who were stricken down and unable to labor 
or even to beg for themselves. These, — abandoned by all, — 
these, the Little Sisters of the Poor lifted out from their 
wretched hovels and brought into their house and hospital ; 
and there they kept them, surrounding them so far as they 
could, with all the comforts of home, and making them as 
happy as possible. Then they went out in the morning 
through the crowded streets of that great city, and begged a 
morsel of bread for themselves and the aged ; and they broke 
their bread and divided it with the poor. There was one of 
these nuns — an English lady — who had been a grand lady of 
the world, — whom I had known as such ; splendid in her 
beauty and her accomplishments; grand in her family; sur- 
rounded with the worship of the society in which she moved 
and over which she reigned as a queen ; but in the day that 
she became a Catholic she gave herself to God, and became a 
Little Sister of the Poor; and I found her here ministering 
around them and nursing them. There was one old man 
among them, an Irishman, over 80 years old — his head, with 
its silver hair, bowed down with age, and his mind returning 
to the memories of his youth, and those he loved, long since 
departed. I spoke to him ; and he said to me : Ah, friar, 
when I was young and had a family of my own I had once a 
daughter, — my colleen ! God took her from me, and she died 
17 



386 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



in her youth. I buried her in the grave. I was dying and 
starving, when she" — (he pointed to the young lady) — " my 
colleen, came out of her grave. She took me in her arms and 
brought me here." The Little Sister heard him, and she spoke 
to me and said, "What does he say? He is always repeating 
those words." And I was obliged to tell her. " He says that 
you are his darling — his joy — the light of his eyes — his own 
colleen, come back from the grave." 

You will see, accordingly, that it is the Catholic Church 
which invests its mercy with the infinite tenderness that can 
only exist in the heart consecrated to God. With the gen- 
tleness that is born of true nobility — with all holy, pure and 
refining influences, does she surround her sick. 

Again, charity in the Church of God, like charity 
in Jesus Christ, is efficacious. It is a hard-working, ever* 
toiling charity. It has gone on for nearly two thousand 
years, and it has not outgrown itself yet, nor is it tired. 
Charity, like that of Him who said, " My Father worketh 
even now, and I work." The Church labors with a charity 
that never knows old age, and she will be just the same until 
the last day as she has been at any time for the past two 
thousand years. The world complains of her importunity. 
These sisters come among you every day, bringing home the 
sick, and appealing to you to give them the means of sup- 
porting those sick and healing them. You may say, " They 
are always troubling us, always bothering, always coming to 
us in business hours for money." Oh, yes ! it is so ; and so 
they will come. But, consider, if you please, that which is 
to you but the paying of a single visit is to them the business 
of their lives. Consider, if it be troublesome for you to put 
your hand into your pocket, or your till, and give a dollar 
once or twice, perhaps, in a year, how much more trouble- 
some it is for these poor creatures, who must go out every 
day of their lives ; for, until the last day of the world's 
existence, the energy of the Church — the hand of the Church, 
which they are — will be as fervent and strong, and as ener- 
getic as it was in the days of the Church when the hand of 
God was fresh upon her ; because she comes from God. 

Finally, the work of mercy with God is universal ; and so 
it is with the Church. Every form of human misery, every 
form of human suffering finds its remedy prepared in the 
Catholic Church, and in her alone. The father and the 
mother die, and the poor orphan child is left alone, the most 
helpless of all God's creatures. The orphan sends forth its 
wail of misery, and upon that voice of the child not yet able 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



387 



to speak the Almighty God hears the complaint, as the 
prophet of old said : " Father and mother have abandoned 
me, but Thou alone, oh, Lord, art with me." There is no 
organization ready to receive it. There is no system of 
organized charity to take the place of father and mother. 
The world makes no contribution for their support. But the 
Sister of Charity or the Sister of Mercy comes and takes that 
little infant upon her virgin bosom to her home, most like to 
the Virgin Mother as she bore the infant from Bethlehem. 
What will be the fate of this child ? Having no mother or 
father, or a drunken, dissolute father who neglects him, and 
the poor, pre-occupied mother who cannot care for or control 
him, he rushes out into the streets, and so among the sights 
and sounds of everything vile he grows towards the time 
when his heart will respond to the first call of passion, 
and neither mind nor heart have received the instruction 
which will enable him to guide or control his feelings. Who 
will save that young soul from the pollution of the world's 
example — that young heart from the destruction of sin ? 
, Yes. The Christian Brother comes ; the consecrated nun 
comes. He is taken from those poisonous streets, where the 
yery atmosphere is filled with corruption, and brought into the 
house of God ; there his young eye is taught to look upon the 
beauty of Jesus and Mary, and his tongue becomes accus- 
tomed to the language of faith, until educated — a Christian 
man — he is enabled to take his place in society, to become 
a blessing to the nation, and the glory and pride of the 
Church of God. 

The young girl who has received the fatal dower of 
beauty, the young maiden, the perfect image of all that 
should be most pure and immaculate, and innocent, the 
young maiden breathing around her the fragrance and aroma 
of her virtue, in the judgment of God more sinned against 
than sinning ; driven — forced into the paths of destruction, 
"by the vile, relentless, accursed action of some demon that 
meets her, she has given herself to sin ; and, now, because 
she was the best of earth's children, she becomes the worst ; 
because she was the purest, she becomes the most abandoned ; 
the involuntary glance at her is sin, the very thought of her 
flashing across the mind is sin ; the air she breathes she 
converts into sin ; the touch of her hand is pollution ; the 
approach to her is destruction and the curse of God. But, 
touched by divine grace, she turns, as Magdalen turned to 
Jesus Christ, and coming to the confession of the Catholic 
Church, she lifts up her despairing hands and voice, and 



388 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



cries out, " Can there be mercy for one so forgotten ; can 
there be purity for one so defiled as I ? " All that the world 
can do for her is what the Pharisees did when they gathered 
up their robes and said, " Go away ; touch me not, for I am 
pure ;" and well would it be for the world if it had so much 
grace. No, there is no remedy for her — no hand can touch 
her without pollution, save one, and that is the hand of the 
Church. There was only one in all the world to whom the 
Magdalen could come without defiling Him ; and that was 
Jesus Christ. The Pharisees were right; they could do 
nothing for her. But the moment she came to Him, — the 
moment she touches His immaculate flesh, — the moment her 
first tear fell upon the foot of Jesus Christ, — the moment her 
lips touched it, that moment Michael, the Archangel, before 
the throne of God, was not purer than that woman. One 
power alone can meet the stricken and abandoned one ; one 
hand alone can lift her weary head; one hand alone can 
receive her tears, and that one hand in that which touches 
her through the Holy Mary, the Virgin; the only one that 
can touch the Magdalen and in that touch purify. When 
the Magdalen arose, He sent her to the Virgin Mary ; and 
she, the accepted one of God, the embodiment of all purity, 
took upon her sacred bosom and embraced the penitent. So 
it is in the Church. No matter what the form of misery, 
no matter what the form of wretchedness or sin, it finds 
its remedy awaiting it in the sanctifying power which God 
has given to His Church. 

Behold the four great attributes of Christian charity. 
Now, one word and I have done. This charity that is con- 
stant, that is compassionate, that is efficacious, that is uni- 
versal, this charity you must all give your own ; and if you 
do not make it your own, I can make you no promise of 
heaven. I can hold out no hope of God's everlasting mercy 
unless you make that mercy and charity your own. You 
cannot make them your own by yourselves. You cannot 
devote yourselves constantly to the poor. Nay, more, you 
are not worthy to enter into the ministration directly and 
personally of the Church's mercy ; you are not holy enough, 
you are not grand enough. There (pointing to the Sisters 
who were present), there are the priestesses of the mercy of 
the Church of God. Fill their hands in pity, and receive 
them at all times as Lot received the three angels of God at 
the door of his temple ; receive them as angels of God ; for 
they are the angels of your soul, who will secure the attri- 
butes of mercy for you. Fill their hands, I charge you, that 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



3B9 



you may get credit before God, that you may get credit 
for the constancy and the universality of their mercy. 
Then, when the day of your judgment comes, you 
shall be astonished, as the Gospel tell us, at the sudden- 
ness of your unexpected salvation ; you shall be astonished 
when you find that you have been clothing, helping, feeding, 
visiting Jesus Christ all your life ; and every single act 
these nuns performed through you, and in your charity, and 
in your mercy, will be recorded as a crown of glory to rest 
upon your brows forever. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Sunday morn- 
ing, June 16, in the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer's, Lexington Avenue, 
New York.] 



"the divine commission of the church." 



" At that time : It came to pass, that when the multitude pressed 
upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Genesareth. 
And he saw two ships standing by the lake ; but the fishermen were 
gone out of them, and were washing their nets. And going up into 
one of the ships that was Simon's, he desired him to draw back a little 
from the land. And sitting, he taught the multitude out of the ship. 
Now when he had ceased to speak, he said to Simon : Launch out into 
the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answer 
ing, said to him : Master, we have labored all the night, and have taken 
nothing ; but at thy word I will let down the net. And when they had 
done this, they enclosed a very great multitude of fishes, and their net 
broke. And they beckoned to their partners that were in the other 
ship, that they should come and help them. And they came and rilled 
both the ships, so that they were almost sinking. Which when Simon 
Peter saw, he fell down at Jesus' knee, saying : Depart from me, for 1 
am a sinful man, Lord. For he was wholly astonished and all that 
were with him, at the draught of the fishes that were taken. And so 
were also James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were Simon's part- 
ners. And Jesus saith to Simon: Fear not; from henceforth thou 
ghalt catch men. And having brought their ships to land, leaving all 
things, they followed Him."— Luke v : 1-11. 

When we read the positive doctrines laid down in the 
Gospel, we are bound to open our minds to the utterances of 
the Almighty God. We are also bound to meditate upon 



390 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



even what appear to "be the most trifling incidents recorded 
in the actions and sayings of Jesns Christ. Every word that 
is recorded of Him has a deep and salutary meaning. There 
is not one word in the Gospel, nor one incident, that is not 
full of instruction for us ; and the evidence that this Gospel 
gives of the divinity of the Christian religion, and of the 
divine origin of the Church, lies not only in the "broad asser* 
tion, — -such, for instance, as where Christ says : "I will build 
my Church upon a rock ; and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it ; " or, elsewhere : "He that will not hear th«. 
Church, let him be to thee as a heathen and a publican ; ' 
but these evidences lie also in the minor incidents which ait» 
so carefully recorded in the mysteries which they convey to 
us. Now J ask you to consider in this spirit the Gospel which 
I have just read to you. St. Peter, — who was afterwards the 
Pope of Rome, — began life as a fisherman, on the shores of 
the Sea of Galilee. He had his boats, he had his nets ; he 
swept those waters, pursuing his humble trade in company 
with James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and with Andrew, 
his own elder brother. These men had passed the night upon 
the bosom of the waters, toiling and laboring, but they had 
taken nothing. Sad and dispirited for so much time and 
labor lost, they landed from their boats in the morning ; and 
they took out their nets to wash them. While they were 
thus engaged, a great multitude appeared in sight, — men who 
followed the Lord Jesus Christ, and pressed around Him, that 
they might hear the words of divine truth from His lips. He 
came to the shores of the Lake, and he entered into one of the 
boats ; and the Evangelist takes good care "to tell us that the 
boat into which the Saviour stepped was Simon Peter's boat. 
He then commanded Peter to push out a little from the land 
that he might have a little water between Him and the peo- 
ple, and yet not remove Himself so far from them but that 
they might hear His voice. There, — while the people stood 
reverently listening to the law of the divine Redeemer, — sat 
the Saviour, in Peter's boat, instructing the people. After 
He had enlightened their minds with the treasures of the 
divine gospel which flowed from Him, He turned to Peter 
and said to him : " Now I have something to say to you ; 
launch out into the deep, and cast out thy nets for a draught of 
fishes." Said Peter, answering : " Master, we have been at 
this work all night : we have labored all night ; and we have 
taken nothing. However," he replied, "In thy word I trust; 
and at thy command I will let down the net." No sooner 
does he cast that net into the sea, under the eyes, and at the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



391 



command of Jesus Christ, than it is instantly filled with fishes, 
and Peter's boat is filled until it is almost sinking. This is 
the fact recorded. What does it mean ? What is the mean- 
ing of this passage in the gospel ? Has it any meaning at all ? 
Was it prophetic of things that were to be ? 

Oh, my brethren, how significant and how prophetic, in 
the history of this Christian religion, and in the Bible, was 
the action of Jesus Christ as recorded in this phrase : " He 
sat in Peter's boat, and from that boat he taught the people." 
What does this mean ? What is this bark of Peter ? Need 
I tell you, my Catholic friends and beloved brethren, what 
this bark of Peter meant ? Christ our Lord built unto him- 
self His Church ! He made her so that she was never to be 
shipwrecked upon the stormy waves of this world. He built 
her so that He Himself shall be always present in her, 
although Peter sat at the helm. He built her so that it was 
her fate to be launched out upon the ever changing, ever 
agitated and stormy sea of this world and its society. He 
declared that Peter should be at the head of this ship ; when 
He said to him : " Feed thou my lambs ; feed thou my sheep;" 
" Confirm thou thy brethren ;" " I will make thee to be a 
fisher of men ;" "Launch thou out into the deep in thine own 
ship ; I am with thee." 

St. Peter himself, inspired of the Holy Ghost, in after 
times taught that the Church of God was like a goodly ship, 
built by Jesus Christ, in which were to be saved all those that 
are to be saved unto the end of time ; for he compares this 
ship to the Ark of ISToah, in which all who were saved in 
the great deluge found their refuge; for he says all were 
destroyed and perished, save and except the eight souls 
who received shelter in the Ark of Noah ; and the rest 
were tossed upon the stormy, tumultuous billows of the 
deluge — thrown upon the tide — and as the waters rose 
up around them in mighty volume, the strong man 
went down into the vasty deep, the infant sent forth 
a cry, and presently its cry was stifled in the surging 
waves. All was desolation ; all was destruction, save and 
except the Ark, which rode triumphant over the waters, 
passing over the summits of the mountains, braving the 
storms of Heaven above and the angry waves beneath, until 
it landed its living freight of eight human souls in safety and 
in joy. So, also, Christ our Lord, built unto him a ship — 
His Church ; he launched this Church forth upon the stormy 
waves of the world, and it is a matter of surprise that this 
ocean of human society has not welcome for the Church of 



392 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



God. Men say, " Is Christianity a failure ?" Why are so 
few saved ? Why are so few found to comply with the con- 
ditions which the Holy Church commands ? Why, if she 
received the commission to command the whole world, and 
to convert them, why is it that this Church of God seems to 
have always been persecuted and abused ? 

Oh ! my friends, there is a deep and profound analogy 
between the things of nature and the things of grace. The 
goodly ship is built upon the stocks ; she is strongly built, 
of the very best material ; she is sheathed and plated with 
everything that can keep her from the action of the seas ; she 
is built so that, in every line, she shall cleave through the 
waters and override them : and, when she is all prepared, she 
is launched out into the deep ; and her mission is to spread 
her sails, and navigate every sea to the furthermost end of the 
world. Through all of them must she go ; over them all must 
she ride ; a thousand storms must she brave ; and that ocean 
that receives her in its bosom, apparently receives her only 
for the purpose of tossing her from wave to wave, of trying 
her strength, of trying every timber and every joint, opening 
its mighty chasms to swallow her up and, failing in that, dash- 
ing its angry waves against her, as if, in the order of nature 
the ship and the sea were enemies, and that the ocean that 
received that vessel was bent only upon her destruction. Is 
it not thus in the order of nature ? is it not this very stormy 
ocean, these mighty, foam-crested billows, these angry, roar- 
ing waves, the thunder that rolls, and the lightnings which 
flash around her, — is it not all these that try and prove the 
goodness of the ship ; and if she outlive it, — if she is assuredly 
able to over-ride them all and to land her. freight and her 
passengers in the appointed port, — is it not a proof that she 
is well built? If the ocean were as smooth as glass; if the 
winds were always favorable; if no impediment came upon 
her ; if no waves struck her and tried to roll her back, or no 
chasm opened to receive her into its mighty watery bosom ; 
what proof would we have that the ship was the making of 
the master-hand, under the care of master-minds ? And so 
Christ, our Lord, built the ship of his Church, and launched 
her out upon the world; and from the very nature of the case 
it was necessary that, from the very first day that she set forth 
until the last day, when she lands her freight of souls in the 
harbor of Heaven, she should meet, upon the ocean of this 
world of human society, the stormy waves of angry contra- 
diction on every side. This was her destiny, and this, unfor- 
tunately, is the destiny that the world takes good care to 
carry out. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 393 

Men say, Christianity is a failure, because this Church 
has not been enabled to calm every sea, and ride triumphant, 
without let or hindrance, upon every ocean. I answer, my 
friends, Christianity would have been a failure if the ship 
had been wrecked ; Christianity would be a failure if there 
was no ocean into which that ship was free to enter ; Chris- 
tianity would be a failure if that ship were known at any 
time, — at any moment of her existence, since the day she 
was built and rigged by Divine law and the Divine Archi- 
tect, Christ, — if she were known for an instant to have gone 
down ; for a moment to have let the angry waters of perse- 
cution and error close over her head. Then would Christian- 
ity be a failure. But this could not be, for two reasons. 
First of all, because the helmsman, whom Christ appointed, 
is at the wheel; and he is Peter, and Peter's successor. 
Second, because, in the ship, Himself seated in her, and 
speaking in her, casting out the nets that are to gather in all 
those who come on board, and are to be saved, is Christ, the 
Lord our God. The great lessons that are in this Gospel are, 
that Peter's boat cannot be wrecked, because Christ, our 
Lord, is in her ; Peter's boat cannot be emptied of the living 
freight of souls, because He is in her who commanded the 
net to be cast out until the boat was filled. Peter's boat 
cannot be destroyed, because Peter himself, in his successor, 
is at the helm. And this boat of Peter's is the Holy Roman 
Catholic Church. In no other ship launched out upon this 
stormy ocean of the world is the voice of God heard. In 
every other vessel it is the voice of man that commands the 
crew ; it is the hand of man that turns the ship's prow to 
face the storm ; it is the hand of man that built the ship, and, 
consequently, every other ship of doctrine that has ever been 
launched out on the waves of this world has gone down in 
shipwreck, and in destruction ; whereas, the oldest of all, the 
holy Catholic Church, lives upon the waves to-day, as fair to 
the eye, floating as triumphantly the standard, spreading as 
wide a sail as in the days when she came forth from the master- 
hand of J esus Christ our Lord. In her the word and voice 
of God is heard. Christ sat in Peter's boat ; and Christ sits 
in Peter's boat to-day ; we have His own word for it. " And 
Heaven and earth," He says, " shall pass away, but my word 
shall not pass away, and my word is this ; I am with you all 
days, until the consummation of the world." But, for what 
purpose, did we ask, " Art Thou with us ? " He answers and 
says : " I am with you to lead you to all truth ; to keep 
you in all truth ; to teach you all truth ; and to command 
17* 



394 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



you, that even as I have taught you, so go you and teach all 
nations whatsoever things I have taught you." 

The voice of Christ is in the Church ; the voice of God 
has never ceased to resound around her ; the voice of God 
has never been silent, from the day that Mary's child first 
opened His infant lips upon Mary's bosom, until the last hour 
of the world's existence. That voice is misinterpreted : that 
voice is sometimes misunderstood. Men say, here is the voice 
of God, and there is the voice of God ; the people lift up their 
voices with loud demands, sometimes against law, sometimes 
against right and justice, and the time-serving politician and 
statesman, says : " It is the voice of the people ; it is the 
voice of God. Vox populi vox Dei." But the voice of the 
people is not the voice of God. There is, indeed, the voice 
of God resounding on the earth, but it is only heard in the 
unerring Church : therefore we may say with truth, " Vox 
ecclesice vox Dei ; " the voice of the Church is the voice of 
God. Wherever the voice of God is, there no lie can be 
uttered, no untruth can be taught, no falsehood preached; 
wherever the voice of God is, there is a voice that never for 
an instant contradicts itself in its teachings ; for it is only 
enunciating one truth, derived from one source, the mind, the 
heart of the infinite wisdom of the Almighty. Where is the 
evidence in history of a voice that has ever spoken on this 
earth, which has never contradicted itself, except the voice 
of the Catholic Church ? I defy you to find it. There is not 
a system of religion which pretends to teach the people at 
this moment upon the earth that has not flagrantly contra- 
dicted itself, save and except the holy Catholic Church of 
Jesus Christ. Take any one of them and test it, where is the 
voice that teaches with authority save and except in the 
Catholic Church. Remember wherever the voice of God is, 
there that voice must teach with authority, wherever the 
voice of God is it must teach with certainty and clearness 
and emphasis, not leaving anything in doubt, not allowing 
the people to be under any misapprehension. Where is that 
voice to be heard to-day save and except in the holy Catholic 
Church ? 

Men say, "Is Christianity a failure?" I answer, No ! It 
will be a failure as soon as that voice of the Catholic Church 
is hushed, it will be a failure as soon as some King or some 
Emperor or some great statesman, successful in war and in 
council, is able to bend the Catholic Church and make her 
teach according to his notions or his views. Where, in her 
history, has she ever bowed to King or potentate ? Where 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



395 



lias she ever shaped her doctrines to meet the 'views of this 
man and further the designs of this other man because they 
were able to persecute her, as they have persecuted her, as 
they are persecuting her to-day ? The most powerful man of 
the world says to the Catholic Church, " You must remodel 
your teachings; you must teach some of the dogmas and 
some of the material principles ; you must admit that the State 
has a right to educate the children ; that you have no right ; 
you must admit that religion is not a necessary element of ed- 
ucation ; I will make you do it." Thus speaks Von Bismarck. 
He imagines because he has put his foot upon the neck of the 
bravest and most heroic race upon earth, that now he can 
trample upon the Church of God. Oh ! fool that he is ! oh, 
foolish man ! He thinks, because he has trampled upon a na- 
tion, that he can trample upon Christ and His holy Spouse. 
He says to the Church: "I will make a decree, and I will 
expel every Jesuit in Germany : I will persecute your Bish- 
ops : I will take your churches ; I will alienate your people ; 
I will persecute and imprison your priests ; I will put them 
to death if necessary." But the Church of God stands calmly 
before him, and says : " You cannot do it : God is truth !" 
Christ speaks in Peter's boat. It is true there are many who 
will not hear His voice. I ask you what is their fate ? What 
is their fate who refuse to hear the voice of the true Church ? 
They appeal to the Scriptures. In this morning's New York 
Herald, there is a letter from a man who denies the immor- 
tality of the soul : and he proves it by " five texts from 
Scripture." The very truth that Plato, the pagan philoso- 
phe, wrote a book to prove, — a man who had never heard the 
name of God ; who had never known the light of God ; — by 
the natural light of his benighted, pagan intellect arrived at 
the conclusion that the soul was immortal, and that its immor- 
tality was inherent, and belonged to it as its nature. 

That which the pagan philosopher discovered and proved, 
the Christian of to-day denies ; and he quotes five texts of 
Scripture to prove that the soul of man is not immortal ; and 
that men when they die, even in their sins, cease to exist. 
They have no judgment, no consequences, no vengeance ; for 
them no torments ; they have no hell. He proves it by the 
Scripture, and gives the lie to Him who said, " Depart from 
me, ye accursed, into everlasting flames." That is the fate 
of all those outside the Catholic Church. They are tossed 
about by eveiy whim and caprice of Doctors, who now start 
one theory and then another ; who now dispute the inspira- 
tion of the Scripture, and again the Divinity of Jesus Christ; 



306 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

who now deny the immortality of the soul, and then come 
and abuse me, and the like of me, because I tell them that 
until they step on board of Peter's boat they have no security, 
no certainty, no true light, no true religion, and that they 
must go down. We are called bigots, because we preach the 
Word of God. If this is not true, then where is the use of 
having a Church at all ? If this be truth, then remain out- 
side of the Catholic Church. But if the Church teach the 
truth, if she comes with a message from God, it is not in her 
power, nor in my power, nor in any man's power, to change it. 
" This is a message from God. This is the truth." Under- 
stand, if they say to you, " You cannot be excluded ; it is all 
right ; you need not mind these lessons ; you need not learn 
them." I come to preach to you the very words of Christ : 
" He that will not hear the words of My Church, let him be. 
as a heathen and a publican," If I come then and say, " It 
is not necessary to remain in the Catholic Church ; if you 
love the Lord and believe, it is all right ;" if I say that I am 
telling a lie, and I am damning my own soul. I cannot do it. 
I must preach the message which Christ our Lord has given 
me. I should be glad to preach a wider faith, if God would 
let me ; but I must preach the message of God. If they steel 
their hearts and turn their ears against our doctrines, God 
will hold them accountable, for He has said : " He that 
believeth not shall be condemned." 

Not only, my brethren, is the voice of Christ heard in 
that Church in the truth which has never changed nor con- 
tradicted itself ; but the second great action of the Church 
of God is prefigured in our Divine Lord's action in this day's 
Gospel. " Peter," He said, " launch out thy boat into the 
deep ; and down with thy nets for a draught. " It is no 
longer a question of preaching. The people have heard the 
Lord's voice ; they have retired from the shores of the lake, 
and scattered themselves to their homes, each one taking 
with him whatever of that word fell upon the soil of a good 
heart. Now, the next operation begins ; and it is between 
Christ and Peter. "Launch out into the deep," He says; 
" cast forth thy net." Peter cast out his net, and he filled 
his boat with fishes. What does this mean ? It means the 
prefiguration of the saving and sacramental action of the 
Church of God ; for not only is the voice of Christ heard ; 
but the action of Christ is at work in her, taking you, and 
me, and all men who will submit to that action, out of the 
waters of passion and impurity, and vain desire, and every 
form of sin, and lifting us up by sacramental action, out of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



897 



those waters, and placing ns in the ship under His very eyes, 
— in the light of His sanctity and the brightness of His 
glory. His action lies in the Catholic Church, and she alone 
can draw forth from the stormy, destructive waters of sin, 
the soul that will submit to be so drawn. A man falls into 
that sea ; — a man, — like Peter, in another portion of the 
Gospel, — the Christian man, — treading upon the fluctuating 
waves of his own passion, of his own evil desire and wicked- 
ness, can scarcely keep his footing, and can only do it as 
long as he fixes his eye upon Jesus Christ, and adheres to 
Him. But a moment comes, as it came to Peter, when the 
waves seem to divide under our feet, when man is sinking, 
sinking into the waves of his own passions, of his own base- 
ness, into the waves of his own corrupt nature, when he feels 
that these waves are about closing over him. He is lost to 
the sight of God; and he sees Him no more. God sees him 
no more with the eyes of love ; God sees him no more with 
the eyes of predilection. He has lost his past with all its 
graces, and his future with all its hopes ; he has gone down 
in the great ocean of human depravity and human sin, and 
he has sunk deeply into these waters of destruction. Oh ! 
what hand can save him! what power can touch him ! The 
teacher of a false religion comes with its message of trust and 
confidence ; comes with its message of giozing and flattery; 
comes to tell this fallen, sinful man ; "You are an honest 
man ; you are an amiable man ; you have many good gifts ; 
be not afraid ; trust the Lord ; it is all right ;" while the 
serpent of impurity is poisoning his whole existence. 

Oh ! that I had the voice of ten thousand thunders of 
God, that I might stifle the false teachings, and drown the 
voice of those who are poisoning the people by pandering to 
their vices and flattering their vanity, and not able — nor 
willing, even if able — to teach the consequences of their sins ! 
The Catholic Church alone, ignoring whatever of good there 
may be in a man, if she finds him in mortal sin, lays her hand 
upon that sin ; she makes the man touch himself with his 
own hand, look at himself, swollen with his miseries. She 
tears away the bandages with which his self-love conceals the. 
wound, and then, with her sacramental power, she scarifies 
and cuts out all that proud and corrupt flesh ; she cleanses 
the wound with the saving blood of Jesus Christ ; she brings 
forth, from out that slough, that cesspool, all the impurity, 
all the wickedness of the man, and cures him, and brings him 
forth with the tears of sorrow on his face, with a new-born 
love of God in his heart, in the whiteness of his baptismal 



398 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



innocence ; and he is now no longer in the wiles of hell, but 
he takes his place and lifts up his eyes in gladness before the 
Lord. What other Church can do that ? What other relig- 
ion even pretends to do it, and does it ? In her sacraments 
she does it. Her sacramental hand will, though sin be sunk 
into his blood, go down and sweep the very bottom of the 
deep lake of iniquity, and take even those who lie there, fos- 
silized in their sin, and scrape them up from out the very 
depths of their misery, and make them fit for God once more. 
As they are out of the way of salvation who hear not the 
voice of the Church — the voice of Christ — so, also, these 
Catholics are outside of the way of salvation who will not 
come and submit to her cleansing and sacramental power, 
who refuse to open their souls to her, who refuse to come fre- 
quently and fervently to her confessional, and to her com- 
munion. To do that is as bad as if they refused even to hear 
her voice, even as if they disputed her testimony. The bad 
Catholic is in as bad a position, and in even a worse position, 
than that of the poor man who disputes and raises questions 
as to whether the soul is immortal, and as to whether Jesus 
Christ is God. 

Oh, my brethren, let us be wise in time ; let us have the 
happiness to know and to hear the voice that speaks in the 
Church. Oh, let us lay ourselves open to her sacramental 
power and bare our bosoms to her sanctifying touch and 
cleansing hand, that so we may be guided into the treasures 
of her choicest and best gifts • that so, if we have not the in- 
effable gift of purity, if we have sinned, we may at least have 
our robes washed in the waters of grace, and restored to their 
first brightness through Jesus Christ, who is our Saviour; and 
in this hope, let us pass the few remaining days of our lives 
here, sharing in our mother's bufferings ; taking a hand in her 
quarrels ; weathering with her every storm that bursts over 
us in the confidence that she is destined to triumph and to 
ride in safety over the crest of every opposing wave. It will 
not always be so. The haven is at hand. The Church mili- 
tant passes from the angry ocean of her contests into the 
calm, and quiet haven of her triumph. Oh, in that narbor, 
no stormy winds shall ever blow ; no angry waves shall 'ever 
raise their foaming crests; there and only there, when the 
night, with its tempests and storms of persecution and of 
difficulty — the night with its bufferings upon the black face 
of the angry ocean, — when all that has been passed through ; 
in the morning shall the Christian come to catch a giympse of 
his eternity. Then will he hear the voice of Him who was 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



399 



present in his sleeping and in his rising, saying to the waves, 
" Be still ! Be calm and to the stormy winds howling 
around. " Depart, Leave us in peace." Then the clouds 
shall fade, and every ripple shall cease ; and there on that 
ocean, which was so stormy, every angry gust of wind shall 
die away into perfect calm ; and, in the distant horizon before 
us, we shall behold the Church triumphant, — while, like the 
spread of the illimitable ocean, we see that pacific ocean of 
God's ben-ign benevolence illumined by the sunshine of His 
blessedness. And there will be every beauty. All that shall 
be ours if we only fight the good fight, if we only keep the 
faith, and the commands of God delivered to us by His holy 
Church. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Sunday, May 
26, in St. Mary's Church, Williamsburgh.] 



" THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THE TRUE REGENERATOR OE SOCIETY." 



My Friends : The theme which I have chosen upon 
which to address you is " The Catholic Church the Only and 
True Regenerator of Society." The first thought that natu- 
rally comes to the mind is, that society must be sick, infirm, 
diseased, — rotten, if you will, — before it can require a regen- 
eration. Reflect ; to what things we apply this word, to re- 
generate. When a system which was once good has degen- 
erated, and become bad, men say, that it ought to be regen- 
erated ; which means that it ought to be reformed. When a 
race become demoralized, when bad blood gets into them, to 
weaken the intellect and heart ; — when they seem to be fad- 
ing away, they ought to be regenerated ; that is to say they 
ought to get an infusion of fresh blood. So it is that we 
speak of society. When we speak of the regeneration of 
society, we must admit at once that this nature of ours, 
which composes human society, is a fallen nature. This 
must be taken for granted before we speak of that nature's 
regeneration. Therefore, before I come to the remedy, it is 
well that I should seek to describe the disease ; just as when 
a physician is called in to attend a sick person, before he pre- 
scribes the remedy, before ever he writes the prescription or 



400 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



tells the persons about him what they haye to do, he inquires 
" How is this ? How has this fever come ? What is his dis- 
ease?" So, too, he examines the symptoms; he asks the 
persons around him, "How long has he been sick? How 
long has he been ailing?" and so on; until he masters the 
disease. Then, and only then, can he see his way directly to 
an efficacious remedy. Well, my dear friends, guided by 4he 
light of divine revelation, we know that, when Almighty 
God made man, He did not make a diseased or corrupt crea- 
ture. " Dens fecit hominem recte" says the Scripture. God 
made man right, God made him in the integrity of his nature. 
God added to the integrity of that nature a higher form, — ■ 
the gift of divine grace. Consider what we were, my friends, 
when God first made us. He made man composed of a 
human body and an immortal soul ; — the body, with all its 
senses, with all its inclinations, with all its necessities ; and 
into that body — formed of the slime of the earth — Almighty 
God breathed a living spirit, — the image of Himself. Out 
of the union of that clay with the spirit of that which was 
heavenly — which came from the mouth of God, — out of these 
two arose the human being called man ; — the beautiful link 
wherein the mere material, gross and corruptible creation of 
this earth is united with the spiritual and incorruptible 
nature of heaven ; the one magnificent bond wherein matter 
and spirit meet. And, when the soul and body first met in man, 
in that moment of his creation, they met, my dear children, 
not as enemies, — there was perfect concord between body and 
soul, — perfect sympathy. 

The soul was created to govern the body ; the soul was 
created to direct every desire, every impulse— to guide and 
direct every passion and inclination of man. All our bodily 
nature, the beauty of interior man lay in this, that everything 
that was inferior in him bowed to the superior, as that 
superior itself bowed down to God and therefore the 
beautiful order in which God made man lay in this ; He 
gave to man an intelligence capable of knowing and recog- 
nizing his Maker ; He filled that intelligence with the light of 
His own divine knowledge. He gave to man a will which was 
to be guided by the instinct and dictation of that enlightened 
and magnificent intelligence ; a will which was perfectly sub- 
ject to the intellect as the intellect was to God. He gave to 
man a heart and affections that were to be governed by that 
will. They were never to rebel against that will. That 
heart and those affections were to be perfectly submissive 
and subordinate to the power of the will of man. He gave 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



401 



to man bodily passions, inclinations, senses and desires, 
which were all subjected to the dictates of that pure heart. 
As it was controlled by a perfectly free will, there was no 
passion in man, no bodily inclination, no desire that rebelled 
for an instant, but was perfectly subjected; — the affections 
and will to the guidance of man's intelligence, — which in 
turn bowed down to God. Then, beneath man and around 
him, every creature of God, — the lion and the tiger that 
roamed the forests ; the mountain stag that browsed upon 
the hill-side, — the fishes that swam the deep, — the eagle that 
spread out its strong pinions to wing the healthy air, until 
he soared among the clouds and gazed upon the sun ; — all 
these were as subject to man as man's body was to his soul, 
and as man's soul was to God. And, consequently, unfallen 
man was acknowledged the lord and emperor of this earth. 
At the sound of his magic and imperial voice, the winding 
serpent came forth out of his home, no poison in his fangs. 
At the sound of his voice, the eagle descended from her 
eyrie in the summit of the mountains, fluttering like a dove 
to his feet. At the sound of his voice, the tiger and the 
lion came forth from their lair, and licked the feet of their 
master, man. Behold, then, the order in which God created 
this world, — He Himself first commanding all things. The 
first precepts of God fell upon the intelligence of man. That 
acknowledged them; the very obedience brought strength 
to him who obeyed ; and every inferior faculty of his soul, 
and of the corrupt and impure heart all gave way — all were 
subject to the intelligence as the body was subject to the 
soul; so that there was an infinite beauty in man. Then 
all things acknowledged him as their ruler and their master. 
Oh ! would it not be grand if Adam had not sinned and 
destroyed the integrity of the soul, — the magnificent spirit 
of man, without his disease, without his infirmity ! Man, 
not knowing what it was to shed a tear of sorrow ; man, not 
knowing one moment's anxiety, and in the strength, and in 
the power of his friendship with God, — the complete being; 
ths acknowledged ruler of all things ; of earth itself, even 
inanimate earth, impregnated with blessings, bringing forth 
all that was most pleasing to the eye and delightful to the 
senses, — fulfilling the order for which it was created — well 
pleased te give delight to its imperial master, man. 

If Adam had been faithful, human society would never 
require a regenerator, because it would never have fallen from 
the high and perfect thing that God made it in the beginning. 
But among the gifts that God gave to man, there was this— 



402 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



He gave him a free will, — freedom of will, which God Him* 
self respected. He said to the unfallen creature: "Before 
thee, oh, man, are life and death ; before thee are virtue and 
vice ; before thee are heaven and hell ; before thee are life 
eternal, and death eternal. Thou must choose, oh man, which 
of those two thou shalt have." For, with all his gifts, — all 
the grandeur and integrity of his nature, man would never 
be worthy of a throne in the kingdom of heaven, — of God's 
eternal glory, until he had first, by an act of his own free will 
chosen to serve that God, and put from him the temptation 
that would lead him from God's friendship and love. That 
temptation came. It is the mystery of these things of which 
St. Paul speaks in this day's Epistle, when he says : " Oh the 
depth of the riches of the knowledge of the wisdom of God: 
how unsearchable are his ways." That temptation came. 
The first man forgot all that he was in his desire to become 
something that he was not. He plucked the fatal fruit of 
knowledge and he fell from all that God had made him. He 
lost the integrity of his nature ; he lost all the gifts of Divine 
grace ; he lost knowledge— the clear, intellectual comprehen- 
sion, the pure love, the exalted, capacious, and unselfish free 
will, unshackled as the eagle's wing — all were lost to him by 
sin ; and he became what we are so familiar with, — the man 
of two thousand years ago, — the man of to-day — confined in 
his intellect, and with labor acquiring a little knowledge ; 
while if he had not sinned, he would have glanced at all 
things, and have known them. He became enslaved in his 
will, subject to these unruly shocks of passion and to the 
wicked desires of his base inclination, which he was created 
to govern and rule, but by no means to be governed by : nay, 
to let it draw him from one abyss to another, until he finds his 
level in hell. Narrow, selfish, earthly and licentious in his 
love, the first principle of love no longer seems to be an ex- 
pansion of the heart, seeking the highest, purest, and most 
intellectual object, and bringing to that object the strength 
of his undivided and pure affection. ISTo ; but it is now a 
mean, wretched, self-seeking, brutal desire to concentrate 
whatever there is of passion and of lustful enjoyment in self, 
and keep it there if he can ; yet in the perception of all to 
allow the erratic heart to spread itself out like water upon the 
pathway of sin and of sinful desire. Man sinned ; he refused 
to acknowledge Almighty God; the very first creature that 
rebelled against God was the intelligence of man that refused 
to acknowledge the argument of obedience. The sin of Adam 
did not begin with the will ; it began with the intelligence 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



403 



Before he made up Ms mind and determined he would violate 
the precept, he thought over the argument : " God tells me 
that I must not eat of this tree, because if I do I shall acquire 
knowledge. This serpent tells me that the knowledge will 
make me like to God." Then he sinned; he sprang upon it ; 
he plucked the fruit ; ate of it ; and consummated his sin from 
that day. 

The moment man's intelligence rebelled against God, that 
moment there was complete subversion and destruction of 
that fair order that Almighty God had created in the world. 
The moment man's intelligence rebelled against God, that 
moment man's will refused to obey the dictates and reason of 
that intelligence any more ; that moment man's passions arose 
up in rebellion in him. The newly made sinner, looked around 
him, not knowing this mystery that was developed within 
him, not knowing whence came those unruly desires, that he 
could no longer govern, — whence came those bitter thoughts 
that poisoned every affection of his heart ; and he must fain 
accept as truth, things that were beneath him. In this, there 
fell upon him a deeper degradation even, than the first sin 
of Adam. Man's own nature rebelled against him ; his body 
of clay, literally and truly a body of clay, which was 
created to serve and subserve the purpose of the 
mind, and of the soul, — that very body arose up and 
demanded homage of the soul, in the gratification of every 
base bodily desire. So the very clay of his composition 
became and took the place of that God whom he had offended 
by sin. And, as it was with man's soul, so it was with the 
world around him. Nature refused to obey the humiliated 
rebel. Animated nature grew hard and stubborn. Upon the 
rose, that grew up to charm every sense of man, there grew 
now the sharp thorn : and in his path the fruitless thistle, and 
the unhealthy weed, to poison him with its taste, to offend 
him with his smell, and to warn him away, and to refrain 
from its touch. Why should nature obey the rebel? The 
animate and inanimate, seemed to be impregnated with the 
curse. "Accursed is the earth in this work to-day," were the 
worc>s of Almighty God to the sinner. Why should animated 
nature obey the rebel against God ? The lion and the tiger 
flashed anger from their eyes, so full of meekness before ; they 
beheld in the rebellious man, one like themselves, whom it 
was lawful for them to fall upon, to seize, and to tear in pieces, 
and devour. The eagle that soared away through the clouds 
seemed to have lost all respect for that magic voice that could 
once call it down from its highest flights in the air. No 



404 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

longer will she heed the voice of fallen man, no more than she 
heeds the growling of the wild beasts, or the lowing of the 
steer upon the hill-side. All nature rebelled against man. 
The fair work, the beautiful work, the harmonious work that 
came from the Divine mind, from the infinite love of God, — ■ 
all is spoiled — destroyed, broken up and corrupted by the sin 
of man ; for as revelation tells us, for four thousand years the 
model man was destroyed in Adam, and did not appear again. 
For four thousand years, sin after sin, curse after curse accu- 
mulated upon the earth, until all that had the slightest ray of 
Divine knowledge had disappeared ; and the word of the 
Psalmist was fulfilled : " Truth is diminished among the chil- 
dren of men ;" until as it went on, they arrived at such a de- 
gradation of sin that they actually deified their sins, their im- 
purity, their dishonesty, their revenge ; and every vile excess 
received the name of God. Thus it was that sin imprinted, 
and embodied, and personified, was lifted up on their altars so 
that they not only avowed their sin, but adored it ; so that 
the principle of iniquity became a God of the world. In four 
thousand years, men sought in vain for light : there was no 
light. Men sought in vain for grace ; there was no grace. 
The model man was destroyed in Adam ; the man who was to 
be the regenerater had not yet come. The second model of 
Almighty God had not yet appeared upon the earth. 

But the years rolled on ; and now four thousand years had 
passed away ; and suddenly the heavenly clouds are pregnant 
with mercy ; the rain of salvation drops upon the earth. The 
golden gates of Heaven are withdrawn, not as of old to rain 
down a deluge of water, to sweep away mankind ; not as of 
old to rain down living fire upon the iniquities of man. Oh ! 
no ; but to rain down the dew of Divine mercy, — the Eternal 
So 1 of God. The Second Person of the adorable Trinity, — 
true God of true God, the Creator of all things, — became in- 
carnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary ; He came down 
from Heaven ; He became true man in Mary's womb ; He is 
born of the Virgin Mother; He rested in her pure immaculate 
arms as He rested on His throne in Heaven. Behold Jesus 
Christ, the regenerator, in whom our nature is restored to 
something far more grand than it lost in Adam. Behold the 
Regenerator of the world, — the man God, Jesus Christ, to 
whom be all honor and glory ! And now you see the disease 
if you wish to know the cure, all you have to do is to look at 
the Divine Redeemer ; study Him well ; study His actions ; 
6ee what he did : see what He was ; and then you will see in 
what consists the regeneration of the world. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



40& 



The sin of Adam brought three great curses from Heaven; 
three tremendous evils were brought upon the world by 
Adam's sin. The first of these was that God Himself with- 
drew from man. Until the sin of Adam, God loved to come 
down to walk in the garden of Eden ; and, in the evening 
time, when the sun was sinking slowly, and declining in the 
west, God loved to walk in the groves of Paradise with His 
unfallen creature, man. Among so many other privileges 
that man possessed, of nature and of grace, he enjoyed the 
high privilege of fellowship, of society with God. Is it not 
so ? Does not the Scripture tell us emphatically that God 
loved the society of unfallen man ? The first effect of the sin 
of Adam was the loss of Almighty God's presence. God 
came again once, and only once ; and then He spoke in anger. 
He left the inheritance of a curse behind Him. Then He 
withdrew into His high heavens. No man beheld His face ; 
no man heard His voice again ; if that voice was heard it was 
in the thunders and heavings of Sinai, striking terror into 
every man who heard it. And we read that when He appeared 
the Prophet of old buried his face in the sand, " lest he might 
see the Lord and die." Everything surrounding Almighty 
God, after that sin of Adam, had changed. The Lord spoke 
in a language of terror : when He came to speak to His peo- 
ple it was not in the language of sweetness as of old they 
heard Him ; but it was a voice of vengeance and of the fury 
of God. The loss of God was the first effect of Adam's sin, — 
the first terrible effect. 

The next effect of sin was, that the Lord withdrew the 
knowledge of God from the earth. Oh, my friends, how the 
ear of unfallen man drank in the music of God, as he listened 
to the voice of God in the Garden, of Eden. God spoke to 
man, and the air around re-echoed with ten thousand har- 
monies, as of the most delicious song, God breathed that 
small still voice of which the Scriptures speak, which filled 
the heart of unfallen man, — which responded to every con- 
cord of that perfectly attuned nature, and throbbed again at 
the breath of that Heavenly voice that swept over him ; so 
that it made music in his soul, harmony in his ear, and 
brought delight and rapture to the heart of man. It filled 
his mind with knowledge — the Divine knowledge of faith. 
Seeing God, he had an intuitive knowledge of God, and the 
Divine nature of God in all its magnificent perfection. When 
God withdrew, the light and knowledge disappeared with 
Him ; but it disappeared slowly. For many ages man kept 
the traditions of the true God. The sun set, indeed, but it 



406 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



set slowly. The darkness of utter night did net come on 
suddenly ; but still the light was sinking into evening, and 
night came on apace. The sun of divine knowledge set 
slowly, but Oh ! how effectually, into the ocean of divine 
wrath ; and there was no light, no life, no truth among men ; 
and the intellectual and moral atmosphere was darkened ; 
all — all was black in the blackness of night. This was the 
sad complaint of the prophet Isaias, when he exclaimed : 
"There is no truth, there is no knowledge of God in the 
land." Thus saith the Lord even to the Jewish people : 
"My people have been silent because they have no know- 
ledge, Cursing, lying and corruption overflow the land. 
Blood has touched blood, because there is no truth, no 
knowledge in the land." Behold the second great loss in 
Adam's sin : the loss of divine knowledge. The thousands 
of forms of human knowledge the soul refused. Human 
philosophy found in the soul and immortal spirit that refused 
philosophy for its food. They found not that food for the 
heart of man ; and yet they boasted of their progress and 
of their civilization as men boast nowadays in the nine- 
teenth century. God is the light — the true light coming 
from heaven. The light comes not from beneath ; the light 
comes from above. You might as well seek the rising sun 
in the darkness of night, as seek the true light of God in all 
the researches of human knowledge or human science. 
Therefore, this gospel of progress, — this scientific gospel, is 
as the pagan religion tells us ; this human philosophy is 
separated from God ; and — from the simplicity of that faith 
— that moment it becomes a lie ; the moment it separates 
itself from God it is a lie from hell, from which every lie 
comes. 

The third great evil, — the third loss of man, by his sin, — 
was the loss of Divine grace. This was even worse — still far 
worse than the loss of God Himself, or the loss of knowledge. 
It was infinitely greater than the loss of knowledge. It was 
greater than the loss of God Himself. I will prove it. Even 
if God had withdrawn for a time, — if man had kept the 
Divine grace, — then, at the hour of his death, he would 
behold that God again. So, it was the most terrible loss, for 
if man had kept Divine grace, the separation from God would 
have been for a small span of years. That grace would have 
kept him holy in purity and in the grace of a strong, abiding, 
vigorous, efficacious command over every passion, over every 
inclination, and have given empire of the soul over the body, 
and all other graces of God to the heart of man, and to the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 407 

soul of man. But, by sin he not only lost the friendship of 
God, the knowledge of God, — the most terrible loss of all, — ■ 
he lost the grace which the Almighty God had entailed upon 
him. So long as that grace was upon him it made him pleas- 
ing to Almighty God. Even the greatest misery of all tho 
consequences of sin, the wavering of the heart, the monotony 
of life, the hardening of the soul, — forming the interior from 
the exterior, — he need have no fear of, so long as God's grace 
was upon him ; he was still a child of God, dearest and most 
beautiful to his Father's heart. It was only when he lost that 
grace, — it was only when he became the slave of his passions, 
the servant of his bodily inclinations, — when he became 
unholy and impure, — only then did Almighty God regard 
him as His enemy, — the man whose existence was a curse, 
and whose end was to be everlasting perdition ! 

These were the three losses. Now we will consider the re- 
generation, and the remedy of the Redeemer. He came. He 
brought back to us precisely the three things that we lost in 
Adam. Oh, how beautiful was His coming ! Oh, how tender 
and loving was the coming of the Son of God ! First, God 
left the earth with anger upon his brow and a curse upon His 
lips. First, He left the earth, — He left the trembling sinner 
horror-stricken at His curse, while the hissing serpent wound 
his way into the thicket and disappeared, with this curse upon 
him. Heaven and hell took up the curse ; the heavens rained 
down the curse, and it sank like rain into the soil of earth. It 
brought sterility to the earth. It brought poison to the snake. 
It brought fury to the lion and the tiger, and to the other wild 
beasts of the forest. It permeated nature ; and then there was 
nothing but despair and darkness as of night. How terrific 
was the withdrawal of our divine Lord from the earth ! How 
sweet, how loving is His coming ! A virgin brings Him 
forth ; a daughter of earth, most pure and holy, yet simply 
human, — " Of the earth earthly." A daughter of the sons 
of men; — pure, young, beautiful, fit to be the Mother of the 
Son of God. She was to bring forth the Majesty and fulness 
of God by her child of grace. He was to come forth, when 
He was thirty years of age, in the fulness of time to preach 
the Gospel and announce the truth. The very first word that 
ever came from the lips of Jesus Christ was the word blessed ! 
He went up into the mountain, when He had called the people 
around Him. After four thousand years silence, God is about 
to speak ! For four thousand years, the echoes that were 
heard in the groves of Paradise, during the long, long ages 
passed, had re-echoed the curse of God. God is about to speak 



408 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



to man. " Blessed are the poor !" How beautiful, how sim- 
ple ! For sin, God cursed the earth ; and He said, on this 
day, to the sinner : "Blessed are the poor !" taking commis- 
seration on poverty, with all its afflictions, — poverty with all 
its humiliations, — poverty, with its naked body starv- 
ing, — poverty, despised and rejected by the world, 
— poverty with its sickness and its sorrows, — poverty, with 
its privations. " Blessed are the poor !" He said, " for 
theirs is the kingdom of Heaven !" Oh, how beautiful is the 
coming of the Son of God in that day ; by His very presence 
among men He brought back the first great thing that Adam 
had lost. God was lost by the sin of man : man lost the society 
and the fellowship of God. God is restored in Jesus Christ. 
In Him dwelt the fulness of divinity. He came ; but He came 
as God. You might look upon Him as one of earth, as a little 
child, trembling in His mother's arms, weeping upon her 
bosom, did you not know that the Eternal Infant is the Eter- 
nal God. God came again to save His fallen creature, man. 
God came with blessings upon His lips, favor and mercy, in 
his hands. God came again to speak words that fell as music 
upon the ears of the sinner and the afflicted one. " Come to 
me, all ye who are burdened and heavy laden and I will re- 
fresh you." " Come to me, oh, ye sinners ; for I am not one 
who requires much. Come to me, oh, ye afflicted and fallen, 
that I may lift you, and give glory to my Father, and give 
joy for the one sinner that doeth penance. For I am all hope 
and love and consolation." Thus came God, the Regen- 
erator. 

Moreover, He brought back with Him what man had lost 
by siu ; namely, the truth — the knowledge of truth. Did He 
come to take sight of the world, — to observe with an all-see- 
ing eye — to scan all its imperfections ? Did He come to judge 
the world, to take silent note of man's weakness, of man's in- 
gratitude for favors, and of the impurity that surrounded him 
— to take silent note of him, and in His infinite wisdom and 
sanctity to judge him ? ~No. " I came not to judge, but to 
save." He came speaking as God, — God proclaiming to all 
men, and to all nations and classes of men, the truth which 
He brought with Him from heaven. He spread that truth 
among men. He declared that they should " know the truth." 
Iso longer should they inquire after the truth. The anxious 
philosopher seeking for his God was a thing of the past. 
Humanity looking for its religion was a thing of the past, for 
the Eternal Son of God said : " You shall know the truth, 
and the truth shall make you free." So He gave to man 



THE CATHOLIC MISSIOX. 



409 



the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, our Lord. But the first loss 
of divine grace was the most terrible loss of all to man, a 
greater loss than even the temporary loss of the fellowship of 
God ; — greater even than the loss of the knowledge of God. 
Oh, in vain would Christ have come and given us Himself in 
His own divine person ; in vain would He have given us 
knowledge for saving us, if He had not also brought with 
Him from Heaven His divine grace, purifying, strengthening 
and reviving the souls of men. Therefore He came not only 
to preach, my dear friends, but also to hear the sinner's con- 
fession and to absolve him. He came not only to propagate 
the truth in His preaching but He came to touch the eyes of 
the blind, to open them ; not so much the eyes of the body, 
as the eyes of the soul. When the miracle had been performed 
— when the blind men's eyes were opened, — he sought out 
Christ and said to Him, " Where is the Lord that I may be- 
lieve in Him?" Then Christ said, "I am He." And he, 
filled with divine light, said : " Thou art Christ, the son of 
the living God." He opened the eyes of that man's soul far 
more effectually to the light of divine truth than the 
eyes of his body to the light of the rising or the setting- 
sun. 

He came to give peace. Now I want to insist upon this. 
Our age is passing over this great feature of the Catholic 
Church. Men nowadays are proud of their multitude of 
religions, and call them all religious truths. Denying one 
another, opposed to each other, — yet they call them aU 9 
religious truths ! But, in their pursuit of truth, I am willing 
to admit and believe that, in very many cases, their pursuit 
after truth is a real, high-minded, pure-minded, earnest effort, 
to arrive at that truth. I would not have you, my Catholic 
friends, imagine for an instant that there is no purity of 
intention or loftiness of purpose and earnestness of will out- 
side of the Catholic Church. ~No ; this would be the highest 
form of bigotry. I would not that Catholics were inclined 
to believe that all earnestness, all sincerity and all goodness 
was confined to us ; — we, who have so much that we can 
afford to be generous, and to be true to those who are with- 
out the pale of the Church ; filled with earnestness in their 
efforts to arrive at the truth ; yet every man imagines that 
he has the conclusion of the truth, as it is in Jesus Christ. 
One man says baj^tism is necessary for salvation ; another 
man says it is not. Both sincerely believe that they have 
the truth as it is in Christ ; and one or the other is believing 
and preaching a lie. But, though I say they are earnest in 



410 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



theii pursuit after truth, I don't say they find it. I say they 
do not. I am as sure of it as I am of my own existence. I 
know, as I know my God is here, that there is no truth — no 
religious truth to be found outside of the Holy Roman 
Catholic Church. If I did not know it, I would not assert 
it. If I did not believe it, I would not devote my whole 
life, in all sincerity, and in fraternal love, to try to induce 
my fellow-men on every side to hear me, — to come with me 
that I might lead them into that Church, and let them bow 
down before that altar. Would I, in common with my 
fellow-priests, devote my life to this truth ; but because we 
know that this truth is necessary for salvation? But, even 
if they had the truth, — if they possessed the truth, — the 
possession of the truth is not enough ; for, even as things 
are, men in their pursuit of truth lose sight of grace. Truth 
alone, — even to the heart of man, the highest form of truth, 
is not sufficient. Divine as that truth may be, it is not 
enough. We, Catholics know the truth. Will any man tell 
me that it is enough when he has made an act of faith? 
Does any man believe that that is enough ? No. No Cath- 
olic believes it : the Catholic Church never taught such a 
thing. Why ? Because. Christ, our Lord, brought from 
heaven not only truth but grace. The birth of that grace 
and truth is virtue to the intelligence that admits it ; — the 
grace of virtue to the heart, to the affections and to the will. 
That grace is necessary for salvation according to the word 
of St. Paul, who says: "Knowledge of the truth is as noth- 
ing." Nay more if you have not that grace which is divine 
charity, you have not faith. Hear the word of inspiration, 
which says : " All my knowledge is as nothing." Do you 
imagine that I or any other Catholic man trusts to his knowl- 
edge to ke-3p him in moments of temptation, — to enable him 
to restrain evil designs, to conquer his passions ? If he 
trusts to knowledge, he will turn away and shut his eyes to 
the power of Almighty God ; and, in the moment of blind 
trust, he stains his soul with mortal sin. Do you imagine 
that we trust to knowledge to keep us in the hour of tempta- 
tion? Knowledge, no matter how extensive, will never 
make a man pure. Why you might as well attempt to moor 
a vessel with a single thread of silk, as to keep down, by 
human or divine knowledge, the passions of man. The 
grace of God, — the grace of God enriched by prayer, — is 
necessary in order to preserve the heart and soul pure in the 
tumultuous temptations of every moment of life. This grace 
Christ gave us in the confessional: this is the most necessary of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



411 



all. Behold, then, in what the regeneration of this world con 
gists, It consists in restoring, through Christ, grace to every 
man among us — it consists in taking away the evil of sin,- in 
taking away the corruption of sin, — and in substituting the 
Lord Jesus Christ. Not Adam; but Christ. Not Adam; 
but some one far above and infinitely greater than Adam. 
For, as it is usual with Him, when He does a thing to do it 
perfectly and superabundantly, — so, when He came with 
the remedy for Adam's sin, He brought a remedy and left us 
much greater, much holier than ever in the days of Adam ; 
and it is here in the adorable sacrament of the altar of 
Jesus Christ. 

"But, what about the Church?" you say; "what about 
the Church of which you came here to preach to-day ? you 
did not say a word about the Church." I know very well, 
my friends, that is all true. They tell a story in old Roman 
history of a poor peasant who had three goats stolen from 
him. Well, he hired a lawyer to plead his case, and to get 
him back his three goats. The lawyer came before the 
judge ; the prisoner was there also ; the lawyer made a splen- 
did speech. He began with the history of the foundation of 
Rome ; he went through all the wars of the Roman Emperors ; 
expatiated upon all the great generals that Rome produced ; 
and he was about sinking down exhausted, after a long and 
magnificent effort, when the poor man went and spoke to 
him : " Will you be good enough, even now," says he, " to 
say a word about my three goats." Now, I am not going to 
treat you in this way. I have dwelt on faith at some length, 
so far, although, in truth, as I did not mention a word about 
the Church, I may mean it all the time. Christ, our Lord, 
is in His Church — Christ, our Lord, solemnly declared that 
He was in His Church until the end of time. Christ declared 
simply and emphatically, that, although He lived in His 
visible person among men only 33 years, He intended to live 
until the last moment of the world's history in His Church. ' 
Therefore, whatever He was yesterday, the same He is to-day. 
Now, mark : the Apostle, St. Paul, says : " What Christ was 
yesterday, He is to-day, and the same forever." He did not 
come to do a transient, or ephemeral work. He did not 
come to teach men to live again after Him as they lived 
before His coming. No ; but He declared, " I am come, not 
for a day, not for a time, but for ever. I am come to remain. 
Think not that I am going away ! " He says to the Apos- 
tles : "I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you 
again. I will be with you all days until the consummation of 



412 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the world." Bo not imagine for a moment that the work 
which was begun at the moment when Mary, at the Incar- 
nation, said, "Be it done to me according to Thy word;'' 
and God was made present in her immaculate bosom ; do not 
imagine, for a moment, that that w©rk has ever ceased. No ; 
no. Before Tie left, He substantiated Himself in the Blessed 
Eucharist. Before He left, He changed the bread and wine 
into His Body and blood ; and, even as He changed the 
water into wine, at Cana in Gallilee, so He changed the 
wine into the heart's biood of Jesus Christ, Do not imagine 
that the Saviour went away, to return no more, thereby 
giving the lie to Himself ; for He said : " I will come back. 
I will not leave you orphans. I am with you until the con- 
summation of the world. And, as the Regenerator of the 
world speaks through His Church, whoever denies the 
Church denies Christ. In this, mark how clearly — mark how 
emphatically and how distinctly, the Son of God left the 
three marks upon His Church in Himself. 

The three great evils that sin had done are undone by His 
Church. First ; God was made present in Christ. The truth 
of God was made present in the word of Christ. The grace 
of God was made present in the action of Christ through 
His Church, for He said : " There is one thing that I will 
leave you ; no matter what else you may be deprived of. 
They shall cast out your name as evil for my sake. You may 
not have the smiles or the friendship of this world. I tell 
you that the friendship of this world is enmity to God. There 
is one thing you must have. I will send my Spirit of Truth 
upon you, to remain with you for ever, who will abide with 
you and lead you into all truth." The truth and knowledge 
of God shall be in that Church : for He says : " The gates of 
hell shall never prevail against that Church. That truth shall 
be upon your lips ; and as the Father sent me I also send you; 
go teach all nations to hear my commandments." I ask you, 
my friends, can the word of God or man be more clearly or 
more emphatically expressed to assure us that the fulness of 
unchanging truth and the possession of the Divine sceptre 
was to be bound to the Catholic Church for ever ? Is there 
more than this ? He gave to that Church power to grant and 
confer grace, — that which, was the highest virtue of Divine 
grace on this earth, namely, the forgiveness of sin. When the 
Pharisees saw our Lord raising the dead, they wondered, to be 
sure. They saw Him opening the eyes of the blind, and healing 
the sick, they wondered ; yet they never accused Him of blas- 
phemy. But the momem they heard Him say to the paraly- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



413 



tic man : " Thy sins are forgiven thee !" at once they said : 
" Who is this blasphemer, that says, He can forgive sin ?" And 
a perfect right they would have to say so, if He had not been 
Christ; for Christ would have been a blasphemer if He had 
not been God. Not alone in the forgiveness of sin has 
Almighty God achieved the highest triumph of His omnipo- 
tent power. The gift of that power He gave to man, through 
Jesus Christ. " All power," He says, " in Heaven and on 
earth, is given to me ;" and the Man- God, Jesus Christ, dis- 
tinctly gave that power to His Apostles; for He said to them : 
" All power in Heaven and on earth is given to me ; now, as 
the Father sent me, with all that power, so do I send you." 
Then, approaching, He solemnly breathed upon them, as they 
stood around Him, and He said : " Receive ye the Holy Ghost ; 
whose sins you shall forgive they are forgiven them; and 
whose sins you shall retain they are retained." 

The truth of God remains upon the infallible lips of the 
Church. Grace is poured abroad from the sacramental hands 
of the spouse of Jesus Christ. No man can deny this, if he 
admits any meaning to the words of the Saviour. He gave 
to the Apostles and to their successors individually, the essen- 
tial power to forgive sin ; so, in this day's Gospel, He says : 
" Go teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Now I ask 
you what does this mean? " Go teach all nations !" Teach 
ali nations by the power of that word which was to create 
faith ; for faith comes by hearing, — not the word of man, 
but of God. Therefore, it was the word of God that was upon 
their lips that spread the faith. Therefore, it was the word 
of God, enlightening them, enabling them, strengthening them ; 
and as it was upon the lips of the twelve foundation stones of 
the Church, so it is upon the lips of their successors to-day. 
What does He mean by saying " to teach and to baptize 
them ?" What does this mean ? Does it not mean that He 
gave them power to regenerate that which was badly degen- 
erated in Adam? Does it not mean that He gave them power 
to apply His own most precious blood to save the unregener- 
ated, and as baptismal water to cleanse sin from the soul ? 
Does He not emphatically give them power to deal with the 
sin of Adam in one sacrament, and to deal with individual 
sin in another. The favorite argument of those who are out- 
side the Church is that baptism takes away sin. We acknowl- 
edge that baptism takes away sin. We acknowledge that it 
regenerates ; it gives new birth, and that it takes away the 
sin of Adam from the soul. This is really and truly the mean- 



414 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



ing as applied by the Church — this is baptism — this is the re- 
generation. Great God ! the inconsistency of man, who ac- 
knowledge that God has given His Church, in one sacrament, 
the very power they deny in another 1 Why, the Saviour has 
said most emphatically, "whose sins you shall forgive they 
are forgiven ; whose sins you shall retain they are retained." 
Now, my friends, in these great attributes the Church of God 
is nothing more than the type of Jesus Christ, her Divine 
founder. 

Finally, He was not content with giving His Church the 
word of truth. He was not content with conferring on it the 
power of granting grace — that cleansing grace for regenera- 
ting and reviving the souls of men, but He crowned all His 
gifts by giving Himself, and leaving Himself in the tabernacles 
of His Catholic Church. He gave to us the essence of truth 
and of grace ; for, wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the foun- 
tain of Divine truth and of reviving sanctifying grace. In 
this way the Church is the regenerator of society. I wish to 
show you, — I wish to bring home the question more to your- 
selves in a practical manner ; and I ask you, let us suppose 
there was no Catholic Church in the world. Let us suppose, 
for an instant, that she was, as many good, kind-hearted Pro 
testants seem sometimes to think, namely, an idolatress and 
a falsifier. When did she begin to be this ? In what year ? 
Fifteen hundred years ago, let us suppose she was this. Then 
my Protestant friend, you have no authority at all for up- 
holding one iota of Christian doctrine. In early days there 
were more than four Gospels written. The Catholic Church 
took four Gospels and rejected the others. Upon her own 
authority, inspired and directed by the spirit of God, she held 



lie Church for a moment and what have you left ? Is there a 
man in this world that would stand up and say, " This is the 
truth. I am prepared to prove it is, as coming from the lips 
of Jesus Christ," without the aid of the Catholic Church? 
Tradition is gone, — truth is gone, — the Apostolic succession 
is carried away ; the golden link that binds this nineteenth 
century with those centuries that have passed away is des- 
troyed : and there remains on this earth not a single voice 
authorized to teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ ! The order — 
the divine order — that was established in the first beginning 
by Almighty God, before ever Adam was born ; — that order 
which was destroyed by sin and restored by Jesus Christ, and 
completed by His Church, — that order would be destroyed if 




jTHE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



415 



you take away that Church. Let us suppose, for ar instant, 
that the Catholic Church were an idolatress, — that the food 
she gives could turn to poison ; who is to hold men accounta- 
Dle if they escape the law — if they escape the penalty of their 
crimes ? 

There is none but this falsifier and idolatress, to hold 
them accountable. God has loosed his hold of them; and 
who is to hold them accountable ? Who is to make them 
examine their consciences and make that conscience tender 
and that soul pure ? For instance, if a man gets ten thou- 
sand dollars dishonestly, in some transaction in which the 
law cannot affect him ; if that man is a Catholic, the moment 
he goes to confession — the moment he kneels to God's priest, 
and says: "I have made ten thousand dollars unjustly," — 
the confessor says : " You must make restitution. The 
curse of the Son of God will fall upon you, if you do not 
restore it. You need never expect forgiveness, for I will not 
allow you to approach the Altar of God, for Holy Com- 
munion, until you have paid to the last farthing!" A ser- 
vant, perhaps, is in the habit of pilfering, day by day, a 
little ; one day she takes away an ounce of tea ; the next 
day a bushel of coals ; and so on. This goes on undetected; 
and, if you would tell her she was doing wrong, she would 
say, probably: "Thank you for nothing! I know that very 
well, myself. It is no harm, as long as I am not found out." 
But the Catholic servant has to go to confession at Easter 
time. She knows that she cannot approach the Altar for 
communion unless she makes up her mind and her will 
against all pilfering ; and that she must restore to the last 
farthing, all that she has taken. I ask you, in what consists 
the regeneration of society? What keeps it sound? Many, 
outside the Catholic Church say, " Oh, it does not matter a 
great deal ! " But I tell you, it does matter a great deal. 
A young man outside the Catholic Church marries a young 
girl ; for the six or seven years they have been together they 
have lived happily. In an evil hour he sees some one : he 
begins to love another beside the wife of his bosom. That 
moment, the devil's temptations come in. He gets the aid 
of his companions to help him to rid him of his wife ; and to 
a licentious man like him, it does not matter how. Her fair 
name is lost by one breath. He goes into the court and gets 
his " bill of divorce ;" and he drives from her home the wife 
of his bosom, the mother of his children, with a lost, or a 
shattered character. To the Protestant man, or a man who 
is not a Catholic, I say, do not mind my words ; they are but 



416 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION 



as the passing breeze. But, if he can do this, I tell you, the 
religion that permits him or assists him to commit this 
crime, — which is accursed of God, because it is breaking 
asunder the bond Christ has declared should never be sun- 
dered, — is breaking up the very foundations of society. 
But if the Catholic man marries a wife — no matter how bad 
he is, — and there is no man as bad as a bad Catholic — a bad 
Protestant is nothing to him ; — but, if this Catholic is as bad 
as bad can be, he would never attempt to avail himself of the 
power that he sees his Protestant fellow-man exercising, and 
as it is exercised by non-Catholics, so freely ■ in this age of 
ours. If the thought would cross his mind, the Church of 
God stands up, and says : " My friend, God has given you 
this wife ; — whatever else you do, — whatever law you break, 
— whatever crime you commit, — whatever one you prove 
false to — you must love that woman ; for while she lives you 
shall never call another by the sacred name of wife." He 
dare not attempt it. He would like to do an evil thing ; but 
he cannot do it. In which of these two consists the regene- 
ration of society ? 

So, throughout all, the Catholic Church is the regenerator 
of society so it brings out the sacred image of Jesus Christ as 
it is in man. The true regenerator of society is that which 
annihilates all that is impure and bad in man, in the complete 
assertion of the intelligence ; in the dominion of the soul over 
the body ; and in the complete development of the intellect- 
ual, spiritual and angelic in man. Oh, where shall we find 
them so developed ; where shall we find passion and will so 
subdued, love so enlarged and purified, soul so humble before 
God ? Where shall we find the image of Jesus Christ so devel- 
oped as in these veiled ones that you see before you, who 
never for an instant can admit into their virgin hearts one 
vain passion, or to their minds one thought of selfish love ; 
though with hearts lai'ge enough to let in every form of afflic- 
tion and misery that can present itself. And this is the com 
plete triumph of grace over nature. Oh, my friends, if there 
are any here who are not Catholics, would to God that you 
cou!i only open your eyes and see what we see, — that this 
Chirch of God counteracts that Mfe of the world. The grace 
of God — the action of God — is seen in His Church, making 
everything instinct with life, filling men with purity and hon- 
esty. Eighteen hundred and seventy-two years have passed 
away, and the Church is as fresh to-day as she was when 
Peter preached his first sermon. Many ages have passed 
away ; everything else on the earth has changed ; kingdoms 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



411 



have changed : the history of ages is but the history of the 
Catholic Church; for what she was yesterday she is to-day, 
and the same forever, because she is upheld by Jesus Christ : 
for, " As He was yesterday He is to-day, and is the same for- 
ever." I think that we have sufficiently proved that if this 
world is to be regenerated, sweetened, and purified, and pre- 
served in that sweetness and purity, it must be done cnl r by 
the action of the Holy Catholic Church, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Wednesday 
evening, June 5, at St. Mary's Church, Norwich, Conn.] 



THE FAITH OF IRELAND THE TRIUMPH OF THIS CENTURY OF 

OURS." 



After alluding in general terms to the triumph of the 
Catholic faith in Ireland as the only peaceful triumph of the 
century, the speaker went back to the early settlement of Ire- 
land by a band of Phoenicians — the sons of Milesius — who 
landed in Spain, and in accordance with a tradition among 
them that they should discover and occupy a green isle of the 
sea, prosecuted their journey by sea, and landed on an island 
subsequently called by a Grecian name signifying the most 
ancient land, known among other nations as Erin, and which 
we know as Ireland. The early religion of Ireland was pagan- 
ism ; but it was not the sensual and degrading Paganism of 
Greece. They sought a higher object of worship, and, in 
their ignorance of the true God, worshipped his truest image, 
the Sun — the source of light and life. The round towers, 
which abound everywhere in Ireland, and which date long 
before the Christian era, are supposed by archaeologists to 
have been structures on which the Druid priests ascended that 
they might greet the coming sun, and proclaim his rising to 
the people. Ireland was then, as now, divided into four prov- 
inces, each with its kings, and these again subject to a high 
king — the great Irish monarch — who held his court on the 
hill of Tara, where were assembled the wisdom, grandeur, and 
eulture of the nation. Into this assemblage, in the year 432 
of the Christian era, came a stranger, commissioned by the 
then Pope of Rome, as a missionary to Ireland. This was 
Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland, by whose persuasive ar- 
guments, singularly endowed by grace, and the peculiar recep- 
tivity of the Irish people, the Catholic religion was established 
among them. They thoroughly embraced, at his teaching, the 
mysteries and doctrines of the Church. The body of Jesus 
Christ was personated by the bread of the communion. The 
Holy Virgin was known by the more endearing title of " Mary, 
Mother ! " The beloved St. Bridget by that other high title 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



419 



" The Mary of Ireland !" He found them on his arrival all 
pagans — he left them at his death all Christians, and with a 
priesthood and system of religions government perfectly estab- 
lished. 

The progress of Ireland from this time forward, while the 
Continent was being overrun by Goths, Visigoths, and Huns, 
was described. Protected by her insular position, she ad- 
vanced in the culture of all that was high and noble — letters, 
music, the arts — and became the resort of students from all 
the civilized nations of the world. But reverses were in store 
for her. At the end of the eighth century the Danish invasion 
took place. Magnus, the last Danish King, was expelled in 
the year 1104. Ireland came out of her 300 years' contest 
with her Pagan invaders as Catholic as ever. Then came the 
Saxon invasion in 1169. That contest lasted 400 years, em- 
bracing the attacks under Henry VIII. , Elizabeth, Cromwell, 
and finally William, Prince of Orange, with the treacherous 
treaty of Limerick. The injustice of these invasions, the ter- 
rible cruelties perpetrated, and the fortitude and heroism of 
the Irish people under the O'Neills, Sarsfield and others, in 
defence of their country and religion, were described in burn- 
ing language, and produced a profound impression upon the 
audience. Then followed a period of depression, of doubtful 
struggling ; till, at the commencement of the present century, 
there arose a leader, great in mind, a Catholic of Catholics ; — 
that intellectual giant was Daniel O'Connell. As David, " the 
man of blood," was not permitted himself to build the Temple, 
so the Irish people, indomitable as they were and ready to 
wage untiring warfare for the cause of their religion, were not 
to succeed in their object by violent means, but through the 
appeals of O'Connell in the British Parliament, crying for 
Justice, Justice, Justice for Ireland ! The Duke of Welling- 
ton, — an Irishman, though as he became great, he became 
ashamed to acknowledge his nationality — was then Premier, 
and, despite his declaration that the measure should never 
be adopted, he was compelled to draw up the proclamation of 
Irish Emancipation, and, with the signature of George IV. 
appended, lay it at the feet of O'Connell ! From that time the 
agitation was not suffered to subside, and on the first of Jan- 
uary, 1872, the great triumph came — the English Church was 
declared no longer the National Church of Ireland, and by 
this act her oppressors acknowledged that all their efforts for 
preceding centuries to uproot the Catholic religion in Ireland 
had been worse than vain. Thus were the sacrifices and 



420 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

struggles of the Irish people, in behalf of their rel.gion, crowned 
~vith final success. 

And (appealing to his auditory — his Protestant as well as 
Catholic hearers, — said the speaker) do you blame them for 
their fortitude and intrepid adherence to what they believed 
to be right ? Could you respect them, had they proved trait- 
ors to their faith ? Two remarkable circumstances signalized 
this triumph. It came at a time when the bone and the 
sinew of Ireland were in America. There are in Ireland, to- 
day, but five millions ; had her nine millions been at home, 
the triumph might have been attributed to their numerical 
influence. But the truth is, the Irish in America, rather than 
the Irish in Ireland, had to do with determining the action of 
Mr. Gladstone ! . The other feature was the modesty, the 
moderation, and generous behaviour of the Irish on attaining 
their triumph. There was no boasting, no words of insult, 
no bon-fires, no ringing of bells. It seemed rather a day of 
mourning, for fear of hurting the feelings of their Protestant, 
neighbors and fellow-citizens. That was right. They would 
not have been worthy of their triumph had it been otherwise 
— that grand and only peaceful triumph of the nineteenth 
century ! 

Here followed the speaker's peroration ; and grander 
words we have never listened to. He spoke of the welcome 
extended by the citizens of America to " the exiles of Erin," 
and of the consequent debt owed by the latter — a debt he 
was rejoiced to say, that had been repaid in a measure. But, 
said he, you have not repaid all. America expects from you 
the lull debt which you owe in behalf of Ireland, and the 
Catholic religion, the debt of true citizenship, by which you 
are enabled to unite in making the laws and sharing the pub- 
lic honors of this great country, destined, in his opinion, to 
rule the earth, at least by her moral example — a citizenship to 
be exemplified by your patriotism, your sobriety, your purity 
of life — in short, your Catholic virtue. You live among a 
people quick to discern — a high-minded and generous people 
— and your duties are those which will naturally be suggested 
and promptly obeyed by the Irish mind and heart. As for 
the speaker himself, he had visited many lands, and associated 
with many diverse peoples. He had come to America with 
European prejudices, because clouded with European ignor- 
ance. But he had observed, and mingled with this people, 
had conversed with them, and studied their character and 
feelings ; and he would say, that if there is any one on the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



face of the earth whose esteem he was emulous of possessing, 
and who commanded his highest respect, it is the American 
citizen ! 

It is only to be added that the speaker, in the course of 
his remarkable oration, at times seemed to touch with electric 
fire the hearts of his auditory, and his frequent passages of 
Irilliant eloquence drew forth unbounded applause ; while at 
times again, the keen mother wit of the Irish orator caused 
" waves of mirth" to pass over the audience, which were aa 
delightful as his serious and earnest words were pathetic and 
powerful. — Norwich Advertiser^ June 6. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Sunday, June 
9, in the Cathedral, Rochester, N. Y., before the Young Men's Catholic 
Association.] 



"THE FUTURE OF THE IRISH RACE IX AMERICA." 



The rev. lecturer commenced by saying that the subject 
on which he had the honor to speak was the most important 
one which could occupy the attention of the audience or him- 
self on this occasion. It was the future of the Catholic 
Church in America, the future of their race, and its mission in 
regard to the future of Catholicity. Among the charms with 
which God had surrounded the life of man there was none 
more keen than the sentiment of hope and anticipation. We 
differed from the beasts in this. They live in the enjoyment 
of the sensation of the passing moment. Man by his memory 
lives in the past, and with anticipation the mind in imagina- 
tion goes forth to the future. The present moment is to us as 
nothing. While we speak of it it is gone. Our souls live 
more in recollection and hope than in the present, whether joy 
or sorrow be its characteristic. Shut off the cherished memo- 
ries of the past from man, drop between him and the future 
an impenetrable veil — cut off his desires, aspirations, hopes, — 
and what is left of the being man ? The present moment is as 
evanescent as the dream of him who sleeps in the morning. 
Therefore, we live in the past in memory, and in the future in 



422 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



anticipation and hope. Of these two powers of man it may 
be noticed that memory tells of sorrow rather than of joy, of 
the hopes gone, the loved ones lost. She appears like a weep- 
ing goddess, all tears and no joy. But hope is a bright, fair 
sylph, with no frown, no fear imprinted on her placid face. 
No matter what the days gone by may have been, all men 
build their hopes upon pleasant anticipations. This propen- 
sity has passed into a proverb, and is called building castles in 
the air. The men to whom he spoke were mostly of his own 
religion and race, if not born in the green western island, yet 
united to it by many holy ties. For that reason he addressed 
them by the sacred and honorable name of Irishmen. And 
though the past of their land, however clouded with sorrow, 
was a bright one, yet he would not speak of it, but for the fu- 
ture. They were a special and peculiar race, with a strongly 
marked national character, with national antipathies and na- 
tional sympathies. It was his purpose to speak of their future 
in this great country, in which their lot had been cast. One, 
looking at the future of America is impressed by the great 
ness of the vision which rises before him. This continent sur- 
passes in fertility and extent of resources and power anything 
in the Old World. Neither is it broken up into different na- 
tionalities — into warring and discordant peoples. But our 
nation has thrown open its magnificent arms for all. It re- 
ceives them, uses them, and amalgamates them. So, while 
the continent is so magnificent in all its proportions, it re- 
mains united in all national purposes. Rich in natural, po- 
litical, and intellectual gifts, what shall its destiny be when 
the over-crowded Old World shall have thrown its full quota 
of inhabitants into it ? It must shape the destiny of the 
world if it prove faithful to its destiny. It is with such a 
land your lot is cast ; and sons of the green old land, which I 
love with a love second only to that which I bear God's altar, 
which I long every moment of my life to greet again — yet I 
almost envy you your future. That future shall be bright if 
you are faithful to God. What the destiny of America shall 
be, depends, fellow-Catholics, upon whether you shall be what 
God intended — whether you are faithful to your mission. 
The great evil among Catholics is that they do not under- 
stand the purpose for which they have been placed here by 
Almighty God. Your mission is to live so as to make your 
influence felt, to shape the laws, to form society on a Catholic 
basis. Without this, no nation, especially America, can rise 
to the summit of its destiny. 

The wants of America to-day, were Christian faith, hope 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



423 



and love, and there was only one Church which could supply 
them. That her future depended upon faith, hope and love, 
he would illustrate. Just as no man could rise to the fulness 
of his destiny without the aid of God, so no nation could. 
A man might make a fortune or build up an immortal name 
in the world's annals by honesty, prudence, sobriety, and yet 
not attain the end for which God intended him. Temperance, 
prudence, sobriety, honesty and industry were necessary and 
noble virtues, but they were not distinctively the mark of the 
Christian character. They had formed the graces of pagan 
manhood years ago. There were as prosperous, as brave, as 
prudent, as temperate and as upright men as any in our age 
living before the Christian era. But the essential qualities of 
the Christian character were faith, hope, love — the faith that 
catches in our daily life the glimpses of the presence of Al- 
mighty God, the hope that strains after Him and the charity 
that holds him. These attributes lift man up. They tinge 
his character with divinity, stamping upon its earthly sub- 
stance the seal of Heaven. "Without faith it is impossible to 
please God. You are saved by hope. Though I speak with 
the tongue of angels and have not charity it profiteth me 
nothing. Thus these three virtues were necessary elements 
of Christian character. Without them it was Pagan. Take 
the most successful men in history, whose only faith and hope 
were circumscribed by this world, whose love was only for 
themselves — did they fulfil the measure of their destiny ? 
What one of his listeners would exchange places with the 
graetest hero of the world who had lived "without Christian 
faith, hope and love ? 

God had designs for nations as well as for individuals. 
The nation was an aggregate of citizens, and its character 

Do O ... . 

depended upon them. As the individual without faith, hope 
and love is pagan, so is the nation. And these three virtues 
America lacked. It might seem presumptuous in him, a com- 
parative stranger, to assert that the nation wanted faith, hope 
and love. Yet, judging in the light of his study and experi- 
ence, he would undertake to prove it. Go outside of the Cath- 
olic Church and you would find men of intellect, honor, and 
prudence, possessed of all virtues save these thr£e. For in- 
stance, do they know the truth? No. Faith is not search 
after truth, but the knowledge of it. Looking lor religion is 
not faith; but the possession of it. Nearly every man in 
America was seeking for religion. It was the principle of 
Protestantism that its professors must search the Scriptures. 
Ho who ceased relapsed into infidelity. When he looked at 



424 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the vagueness, uncertainty and dissensions of the varioua 
sects throughout the land, he could entertain for them no 
other sentiment save one of contempt. The Catholic Church 
alone could say, "This is the way of life, and you must walk 
in it. This is the truth, which you must believe." But has 
she the right to say so? Shall we not test her authority? 
The speaker, in answer, went on to consider the marks of the 
Catholic Church which proved her divine power, concluding 
that the faith which was needed for our national salvation 
could not be found outside of her pale. 

In the next place, America wanted hope — that implicit 
confidence in the power of Almighty God to open up the glo- 
ries of heaven to us upon compliance with certain conditions. 
He who reeeived Jesus Christ had the word of God for his fu- 
ture. Such he had promised to raise up at the last day. 
This union with Christ the speaker interpreted to mean the 
sacrament of the Eucharist. America denied the existence of 
any such food, and was thus cut off from the promise con- 
veyed in our Saviour's language. It was vain to say that we 
partook of Christ's flesh and blood by prayer and the ap- 
proach of the spirit. That had been possible under the old 
dispensation. The promise was meant to add something, or 
else the words were nonsense. The words meant what they 
said, or nothing. The hope of the nation was founded in tem- 
poral things, and the efficiency of human reason, and was 
therefore fallible. 

The speaker next took up the love of God, and considered 
its unfathomable nature. We should revere Him so as to 
make His love the substance of our lives, the spring of our 
quickest zeal and mightiest effort. "Was God regarded with 
this absolute affection throughout the land? Did His love 
rule the thoughts and guide the hearts of the people ? It 
seemed to him as if everything was loved better than God — 
money, lands, possessions, impurity. Turning upon some of 
the sins of society, the speaker prayed for some of the power 
of the prophet of old to denounce them. Licentiousness had 
crept even into the legislation of Europe and America. Hu- 
man law had dared to put apart man and wife, in direct oppos- 
ition to the command of God. Modern licentiousness was 
becoming like that of old pagan times. Was this love of 
God ? The second branch of this precept of charity was 
love for our neighbor, under which term wife and children 
were first placed. It was plain that, outside of the Catholic 
Church, the best woman in the world might, on a false and 
trumped-up charge of a wicked husband, be accused and sent 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



425 



away, with reputation blasted, while her lord's paramour 
might be installed in her place, in an adulterous union, as 
mistress over her family and household. As for our duty to 
our children, it was the great question of the day, and the 
one on whose solution the faith of the world depended. In 
this connection the speaker paid an elegant compliment to 
the part which Bishop McQuaid had taked in discussing the 
Catholic doctrine on this subject. There are, in our day, three 
systems of education presented to the father of a child. In 
the first place, the State comes and says " I will educate your 
children for you." The parent is so careless of the welfare 
of his brood as not to ask the most important questions in 
reply. " Have you a divine commission ? Did God give you 
a charge over this matter ? How do you intend to use the 
right which you claim ?" "Where, in Scripture, common-sense 
or reason, can we find a commission for the state to educate ? 
It is the sacred right of the father. 

Education must be such as will call out in the child's char- 
acter all for which he was intended by nature. It determined 
his future. As the father is to the body so is it to the mind, 
shaping its character and destiny. In this age, the speaker 
said, the people were fond of big words. They were thrown 
like sand in the eyes of men, blinding them to any meaning. 
The phrase unsectarian education was one of this kind; unsec 
tarian was a fine, large word of five syllables, and its sound 
pleased people's ears. The phrase meant education in philoso- 
phy, history and the exact sciences, unconnected with religious 
instruction. Translated into three short Saxon words, these 
long Latin words signify simply " teaching without God." 
Were they aware of the worthlessness of such teachings ? The 
pagans of the Augustan era, the time when Christ was born, 
were not an ignorant people. They were at the height of 
culture, refinement and intellectual achievement. They pos- 
sessed merely knowledge without God, and their wisdom was 
folly in His sight. Knowledge without God was head with- 
out heart, brain without the noble affections of the soul. 
Fathers willing to accept such an education had no love for 
their children. Yet, was it possible to teach anything without 
God ? A student from one of the Queen's Colleges had told 
him, not long before, that during over a year's study the name 
of God had not been mentioned ; and he thought there was 
no necessity for religion in education. Yet, how else could 
history, the working out of God's purposes, be taught ? The 
very first act to be considered, the act of creation, required 
the consideration of the existence of God. He lay at th6 



426 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



very foundation of history. Philosophy was a reasoning 
from facts or effects of causes. How could we teach it with- 
out God, the great first cause. It would be as well to attempt 
to teach arithmetic without the number one, or the alphabet 
without the letter A. The fact of the matter was, nothing 
could be taught without God, and the pretence to do it merely 
debauched the intellect as well as the heart. 

The second scheme for education generally came from an 
oily and sanctimonious gentleman, somewhat in this form : 
That we should read the Bible in the schools and tench only 
what principles of religion all would approve of. The whole 
system would be managed on a basis of mutual tolerance. 
Unthinking Catholic parents were apt to think this proposition 
a very fair one. The child could learn during the week the 
various branches of worldly knowledge, and get an hour's 
instruction in his religion on Sunday ! To pursue such a 
course the Protestant sacrifices nothing. Everything in 
Protestantism can be learned under such regulations. But the 
Catholic child leaves behind him his sacraments, which are 
the sources of grace, his prayers for the dead, his honor to the 
Virgin and saints, his specific teachings of interior purity. 
He must become a practical little infidel. What is religious 
education for the Protestant child, is for him, as it were, infi- 
delity. Bring our children up in this way, and in one genera- 
tion every vestige of a belief in God would disappear. 

Lastly, the Catholic Church claims that she alone under- 
stands the meaning of education. It is to bring forth and 
develop every power of the child to the fulness of manhood. 
As its little body, if developed by food and exercise, so its 
soul grows by its peculiar nourishment and exercise, until 
the whole being is matured, intellectually, morally, and phy- 
sically. The speaker then analyzed the mind of man into the 
intellect, the will and the affections, and touched upon the 
evil influences which had power over him. Our first enemy 
is ignorance. We are created to know, and do not know; as 
a consequence, the heart becomes corrupted. The heart is 
made to love, and the intelligence proves incapable of direc- 
ting it to a proper object of affection. Love, therefore, de- 
generates into a mere passion and lust. The will is created 
to act freely under the direction of intelligence. Under an 
incapable intelligence the will becomes a slave to the passions 
and moves as a mere instinct. Our next enemy is partial 
education — the instruction of the intellect, not the heart; the 
storing of the mind, and leaving the heart uncultivated. The 
evils of such a course may be illustrated by the undue devel- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



427 



opment of one part of the human body at the expense of 
another. In this way the head of a man might l/e found on 
the limbs of a child, and the limbs of a giant with the head 
of a child. Who cannot recall instances of such distorted 
intellectual growth — men of gigantic mental ability, without 
a single restraining power. Voltaire took in almost by intui- 
tion the whole range of human knowledge ; yet he could not 
guide his weakest passion. The great Lord Chancellor Bacon, 
whose intellect was, perhaps, the strongest ever possessed by 
a human being, would sell a judgment for a paltry sum of 
money. It was the object ol the Catholic Church to avoid 
such an education as this, and develop the faculties of man in 
harmony. While she filled the intellect with every form of 
human knowledge, making men engineers, astronomers, histo- 
rians, philosophers, she would instill, with every idea of the 
mind, a grace into the soul, creating an appetite for Jesus 
Christ, who alone can appease our noblest longings. All intel- 
lectual acquirements should be founded on God's grace. The 
child should grow familiar with the language of grace, even 
before that of earth. On the soft and easily moulded charac- 
ter of childhood it makes an impression, and as the substance 
hardens the dent remains. The speaker instanced the useless- 
ness of intellectual acquirements without religious sentiment. 
Knowledge is power, but, like other powers in nature, it may 
be a curse as well as a blessing. The mettlesome horse uncon- 
trolled, the engine unguided, the lightning in its freedom, are 
terrible powers for evil. 

America needed faith, hope and love. These were the 
foundation stones of the Catholic Church. The speaker went 
on to urge his hearers to the practice of these virtues in their 
lives, touching upon the peculiar faults which tended to 
weaken their influence. In this connection he pointed out to 
them the example of the race from which they sprung, and 
brought his oration to a conclusion in a piece of wonderful 
exhortation, that must have gone home to the hearts of the 
men who listened to him. He drew from the history of 
the Irish race, examples of its strongest characteristics, faith, 
hope and love, and held up their nobler attributes for emula- 
tion. He had evidently reserved his power to the last, and 
his genius rose naturally and easily on broad and rapid pin- 
ions when the audience scarcely expected it. — .Rochester 
Democrat 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Sermon delivered on Sunday, March 10, by the Rev. Father 
Burke, in the Cathedral, New York.] 



ST. PATRICK. 



" Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their genera- 
tion . . . these men of mercy whose godly deeds have not failed ; 
good things continue with their seed. Their posterity are a holy inher- 
itance ; and their seed hath stood in the covenants of their children and 
for their sake remain for ever ; their seed and their glory shall not be 
forsaken. Let the people show forth their wisdom, and the Church de- 
clare their praise." — Eccle. 44. 

After an introductory reference to the duty of the day, 
which was to obey the command of God expressed in the text, 
the father descanted at length upon the celebration of saints 
by the Church. He traced rapidly, but graphically, the estab- 
lishment of Christianity in the world, and as to its introduc- 
tion to Ireland by St. Patrick, he proceeded to say as 
follows : 

The conversion of Ireland, from the time of St. Patrick's 
landing to the day of his death, is, in many respects, the 
strangest fact in the history of the Church. The saint met 
with no opposition ; his career resembles more the triumphant 
progress of a king than the difficult labor of a missionary. 
The gospel, with its lessons and precepts of self-denial, prayer 
of purity, in a world of the violence which seizes on heaven, 
is, not congenial to fallen man. His pride, his passion, his blind- 
ness of intellect and hardness of heart, all oppose the spread 
of the Gospel ; so that the very fact that mankind has so 
universally accepted it, is adduced as a proof that it must be 
from God. The work of the Catholic missionary has,, there- 
fore, ever been, and must continue to be, a work of great la- 
bor with apparently small results. Such has it ever been 
among all the nations, and yet Ireland seems a grand excep- * 
tion. She is, perhaps, the only country in the world that 
entirely owes her conversion to the work of one man. He 
found her universally Pagan ; he left her universally Christian. 
She is again the only nation that never cost her apostle an 
hour of sorrow, a single tear, a drop of blood. She welcomed 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



429 



him like a friend, took the word from his lips, made it at once 
the leading feature of her life, put it into the blood of her 
children and into the language of her most familiar thoughts, 
and repaid her benefactor with her utmost veneration and 
love. And much, truly, had young Christian Ireland to 
love and venerate in her great apostle. All sanctity, coming 
as it does from God, is an imitation of God in man. This 
is the meaning of the word of the apostle — " those whom he 
foreknew and predestined to be made conformable to the im- 
age of His Son, the same He called, and justified, and glori- 
fied." Conformity to the image of God is therefore Christian 
perfection or sanctity, " the mystery which was hidden from 
eternity with Christ in God." But as our Lord Jesus Christ, 
" in whom dwelt, the fulness of the Godhead corporally," is 
an abyss of all perfection, so do we find the saints differing 
one from another in their varied participations of His graces 
and resemblance to His divine gifts, for so " star cliffereth 
from star in glory." Then, among the apostles, we are accus- 
tomed to think and speak of the impulsive zeal of Peter, the vir- 
ginal purity of J ohn, etc., not as if Peter were not pure, or John 
wanting in zeal, but that where all was the work of the spirit 
of God, one virtue shone forth more prominently, and seemed 
to mark the specific character of sanctity in the saint. Now, 
among the many great virtues which adorned the soul of Ire- 
land's apostle, and made him so dear to the people, I find 
three which he made especially his own, and these were a spirit 
of penance, deepest humility and a devouring zeal for the sal- 
vation of souls. A spirit of penance. It is remarkable and 
worthy of special notice in these days of self-indulgence and 
fanciful religions, how practical the Gospel is. It is pre-emin- 
ently not only the science of religious knowledge, but also of 
religious life. It tells us not only what we are to believe, but 
also what we are to do. And now, what is the first great 
precept of the Gospel? It is penance. My brethren, "do 
penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand." And when, on 
the day of Pentecost, the Prince of the Apostles first raised up 
the standard of Christianity upon the earth, the people " when 
they heard these things had compunction in their hearts, and 
said to Peter, and to the rest of the Apostles, What shall we do, 
men and brethren ? and Peter said to them, Do penance, and 
be baptized every one of you." This spirit of penance was 
essentially Patrick's. His youth had been holy ; preserved 
from earliest childhood by " the blessings of sweetness," he 
had grown up like a lily in purity, in holy fear, and love. Yet 
for the carelessness and slight indiscretions, of his first years he 



430 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



was filled with compunction and with a life-long sorrow. His 
gin, as he called it, was always before him, and with the prophet 
he cried out, "who will give water to my Ys%& and a fountain 
of tears to mine eyes, and I will weep dpy ?nd night." In his 
journeyings he was wont to spend the nirV, in prayer and tears 
and bitter self-reproach, as if he wa? the greatest of sinners ; 
and when he hastened from "Royal Vc^tlr' into the far west of 
the island, we read that when Lpirr approached he suspended 
his labors for a time and went up \ he steep, rugged side of 
Croagh Patrick, and there, lik^ his divine Master, he spent 
the holy time in fasting and prayer : and his " tears were his 
food night and day." Whithersoever he went he left traces 
of his penitential spirit behind him, and Patrick's penance 
and Patrick's purgatory are still familiar traditions in the 
land. Thus, my brethren, did he " sow in tears," who was 
destined to reap in so much joy ; for so it is ever with God's 
saints, who do his work on this earth ; going, they went and 
wept, scattering the seed, but coming they shall come with 
joy." His next great personal virtue was a wonderful humil- 
ity. KTow, this virtue springs from a two-fold knowledge — 
namely, the knowledge of God and of ourselves. This was 
the double knowledge for which the great Saint Augustine 
prayed, " Lord let me know Thee and know myself, that I 
may love Thee and despise myself ; " and this did our saint 
possess in an eminent degree. This knowledge of God con- 
vinced him of the utter worthlessness of all things besides 
God, and even of God's gifts, except when used for Himself ; 
and therefore he did all things for God and nothing for self, 
and of " his own he gave Him back again ; " he lost sight 
of himself in advancing the interests and the cause of God, 
he hid himself behind his work in which he labored for God ; 
and strangely enough, his very name and history come down 
to us by reason of his great humility, for he would write nim- 
, self a sinner, and calls himself "Patrick, an unworthy and 
ignorant and sinful man : " for so he saw himself, judging 
himself by the standard of infinite holiness in Jesus Christ, by 
which we also shall be one day judged. 

After descanting at some length upon the humility and 
the virtues of the saint, he said : The peculiar points of St, 
Patrick's teaching were the following : Fidelity to St. Peter's 
chair and to St. Peter's successor, the Pope of Rome ; demo- 
tion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, prayer and remembrance 
for the dead, and confiding obedience and love for their 
bishops and priests. These were the four great prominent 
features of Patrick's teaching. By the first — namely, fidel- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



431 



ity to the Pope — he secured the unity of the Irish Church 
as a living member of the Church Catholic ; by the second — 
devotion to the Blessed Virgin — he secured the purity and 
morality of the people ; by the third — care of the dead — he 
enlisted on the side of Catholic truth the natural lore and 
strong feelings of the Irish character ; and by the last — 
attachment and obedience to the priesthood — he secured to 
the Irish Church the principle of internal union, which is the 
secret of her strength. He preached fidelity and unswerv- 
ing devotion to the Pope — the head of the Catholic Church. 
Coming direct from Rome, and filled with ecclesiastical knowl- 
edge, he opened up before the eyes of his new children and 
revealed to them the grand design of Almighty God in His 
Church. He showed them in the world around them the 
wonderful harmony which speaks of God ; then rising into 
the higher world of grace he preached to them the still more 
wonderful harmony of redemption and of the Church ; the 
Church, so vast as to fill the whole earth, yet as united in 
doctrine and practice as if she embraced only the members 
of one small family of the inhabitants of one little village ; 
the Church, embracing all races of men, and leaving to ali 
their full individual freedom of thought and action, yet ani- 
mating all with one soul, quickening all as with one life and 
one heart, guiding all with the dictates of one immutable 
conscience, and keeping every, even the least member, under 
the dominion of one head. Such was the Church on which 
Patrick engrafted Ireland. "A glorious Church, without 
spot or wrinkle ; " a perfect body, the very mystical body of 
Jesus Christ, through which " we, being wild olives, are 
engrafted on Him, the true olive tree," so that " we are made 
the flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones." Xow Patrick 
taught our fathers, with truth, that the soul, the life, the 
heart, the conscience and the head of the Church is Jesus 
Christ, and that His representative on earth, to whom He has 
communicated all His graces and powers, is the Pope of 
Pome, the visible head of God's Church. The Bishop of 
bishops, the centre of unity and doctrine, the rock and the 
corner-stone on which the whole edifice of the Church is 
founded and built up. 

All this he pointed out in the Scriptures, from the words 
of our Lord to Peter. Peter was the shepherd of the world, 
whose duty it was to " feed both lambs and sheep" with 
" every word that cometh from the mouth of God." Peter 
was the rock to vustain and uphold the Church : " thou art 
Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church" (words 



432 



THE CATnOLIC MISSION. 



"which are the very touchstone of faith in these days of sor- 
row). Peter's was the strong, unerring voice which was ever 
to he heard in the Church, defining her doctrines, warning 
off enemies, denouncing errors, rebuking sinners, guiding the 
doubtful, strengthening the weak, confirming the strong ; and 
Jesus said, " Thou, O Peter, confirm thy brethren." Patrick 
taught the Irish blood not to be scandalized if they saw the 
cross upon Peter's shoulders and the crown of thorns upon 
His head, for so Christ lives in His Church and in her 
supreme Pastor ; but He also taught them that he who strikes 
Peter strikes the Lord; He taught them what history has 
taught us, that "whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall 
be bruised ; and upon whomsoever it shall fall it will grind 
him to powder." He taught them that in the day when they 
separated from Peter they separated from Christ, as did the 
foolish men in the Gospel : " After this many of His disciples 
went back and walked no more with Him. Then Jesus said 
to the twelve, Will you also go away ? And Simon Peter 
answered Him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life.' " Thus it was, my brethren, that He 
bound them to " the rock of ages," to Peter's chair, with 
firmest bonds of obedience and love, and infused into their 
souls that supernatural instinct, which, for 1,500 years, has 
kept them, through good report and evil report, through 
persecution and sorrow, faithful and loyal to the Holy See 
of Rome. It was a bond of obedience and love that bound 
Ireland to Rome. Thus, in the beginning of the seventh 
century, when the Irish Bishops assembled to consider the 
question of celebrating Easter, we find the fathers selecting 
some " wise and humble men," and sending them to Rome 
for instruction, "as children to their mother;" and this, in 
obedience to a primitive law of the Irish Church, which 
enacted that, in every difficulty that might arise, " the ques- 
tion should be referred to the Head of Cities," as Rome was 
called. This devotion to the Holy See saved Ireland in the 
day of trial. 

The next great feature in Patrick's preaching w<as devo- 
tion to the Mother of God. Of this we have abundant proof 
in the numerous churches built and dedicated to God under 
her name. Teampoill Mhuire, or Mary's Church, became a 
familiar name in the land. In the far west of Ireland, where 
the traditions of our holy faith are still preserved, enshrined 
in the purest form of our grand old Celtic language, the 
sweet name of the Mother of God is heard in the prayers and 
■ongs of the people, in their daily familiar converse, in the 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



433 



supplications of the poor, not under the title of " Our Lady " 
or of "Blessed Virgin," but by the still more endearing 
name, Muive Mathaire — " Mary Mother." And so it was 
that Patrick sent his Catholic doctrines home to the hearts 
of the people. He preached Jesus Christ under the name by 
which He is still known and adored in that far western land, 
Mac net Maighdine — " The Virgin's Son," thus admirably in- 
sinuating the great mystery of the Incarnation, and preach- 
ing Jesus through Mary, and Mary herself he preached, with 
all her graces and glories, as " Mary Mother." The example 
of her virginal purity and maternal love he made the type of 
the Irish maiden and mother, and so well did they learn their 
high lesson that they have been for ages the admiration of 
the world and the glory of their afflicted country. The devo- 
tion to Mary sank deep into the heart of the nation. So well 
had they already learned to love and appreciate her, that, in 
a few years after their conversion to the faith, when they 
would express their love and admiration for the first great 
Irish virgin saint — Saint Bridget — they thought they had 
crowned her with glory when they called her " The Mary of 
Ireland," This devotion to Mary was a protecting shield 
over Ireland in the day of her battle for the faith. 

The third great ju'ominent point in St. Patrick's preach- 
ing was the doctrine of purgatory, and, consequently, careful 
thought and earnest prayer for the dead. This is attested by 
the ordinances of the most ancient Irish synods, in which 
oblations, prayers and sacrifice for the dead are frequently 
mentioned, as evidently being the practice, frequent and lov- 
ing, of the Church. They were not unmindful of the dead, 
"like others who have no hope." Every ancient church had 
its little graveyard, and the jealous care of the people, even 
to this day, for these consecrated spots, the loving tenacity 
with which they have clung to them at all times, speak of 
their faith in this great doctrine, and tell us how much Irish 
hope and love surrounds the grave. " Nothing is our own 
except our dead," says the poet, and so these affectionate 
hearts took with joy the doctrine of mercy, and carried their 
love and their prayer beyond the tomb into the realms of 
expiation, where the dross of earth is purged away, the gold 
and silver refined and souls saved and prepared for Heaven, 
"yet so as by fire." This doctrine of the Church, so forcibly 
taught by Patrick, and warmly accepted by the Irish people, 
was also a great defence to the nation's faith during the long 
ages of persecution and sorrow. Devotion to the Mother of 
God was the next great feature of Patrick's preaching and 



434 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



of Ireland's Catholicity. The image of all that was fairest 
in nature and grace, which arose before the eyes of the peo- 
ple, as depicted by the great Apostles, captivated their imag- 
inations and their hearts. They called her in their prayers, 
" Midendheelisli " — their darling Virgin. In every family in 
the land the eldest daughter was a Mary ; every Irish maid 
or mother emulated the purity of her virginal innocence or 
the strength and tenderness of her maternal love. With the 
keenness of love they associated their daily sorrows and joys 
with hers ; and the ineffable grace of maiden modesty which 
clung to the very mothers of Ireland seemed to be the 
brightest reflection of Mary which had lingered upon the 
earth. 

Finally, the great Saint established between the people and 
their priesthood the firmest bonds of mutual confidence and 
love. In the Catholic Church the priest is separated from 
men and consecrated to God. The duties of his office are so 
high, so holy and supernatural, and require such purity of 
life and devotion of soul, that he must of necessity stand 
aloof from among men and engage himself with God ; for, to 
use the words of the Apostle, he is " the minister of Christ 
and the dispenser of the mysteries of God." The Irish 
Church knew no childhood, no ages of painful and uncertain 
struggle to put on Christian usages and establish Christian 
traditions. Like the children in the early ages of the Church, 
who were confirmed in infancy, immediately after baptism, 
Ireland was called upon as soon as converted to become at 
once the mother of saints, the home and refuge of learning, 
the great instructress of the nations ; and, perhaps, the his- 
tory of the world does not exhibit a more striking and glo- 
rious sight than Ireland for the .300 years immediately follow- 
ing her conversion to the Catholic faith. The whole island 
was covered with schools and monasteries, in which men, the 
most renowned of their age, both for learning and sanctity, 
received the thousands of students who flocked to them from 
every land. Whole cities were given up to them, as we 
read of Armagh, which was divided into three parts : "Trian- 
more," or the town proper ; " Trian-Patrick," or the Cathe- 
dral close ; and " Trian-Sassenagh," or the Latin quarter, the 
home of the foreign students. 

A long historical sketch of the religious history of Ire- 
land was introduced here, after which the perpetuity of the 
faith was referred to as follows : 

Ireland's preservation of the Catholic faith has been a puz- 
zle to the world, and men have sought to explain in many dif. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



435 



ferent ways the extraordinary phenomenon. Some ascribe it 
to our natural antipathy and opposition to England and every- 
thing English ; others again, allege the strong conservatism 
of the Irish character, and its veneration for ancient rites and 
usages, merely because they are ancient, while English histori- 
ans and philosophers loA T e to attribute it to the natural obstin- 
acy and wrong-headedness which they say is inherent in the 
Irish. I do not deny that among the minor and human causes 
that influenced the religious action of the Irish people, there 
may have been a hatred and detestation of England. The 
false religion was presented to our fathers by the detested 
hands that had robbed Ireland of her crown ; it was offered 
at the point of the sword that had shed (often treacherously 
and foully) the blood of her bravest sons ; the nauseous close 
of Protestantism was mixed in the bowl that poisoned the last 
of her great earls, Owen Roe O'lSTeil. All this may have told 
with the Irish people ; and I also admit that a Church and 
religion claiming to be of God with such a divinely appointed 
head as the saintly Henry the Eighth, such a nursing mother 
as the chaste Elizabeth, such gentle missionaries as the humane 
and tender-hearted Oliver Cromwell, may have presented diffi- 
culties to a people whose wits were sharpened by adversity, 
and who were not wholly ignorant of the Christian character, 
as illustrated in the history and traditions of their native 
land. 

We may also admit to a slight extent the conservatism of 
the Irish character and its veneration for antiquity. Oh, how 
much our fathers had to love in their ancient religion ! Their 
history began with their Christianity ; their glories were all 
entertwined with their religion ; their national banner was 
inscribed with the emblem of their faith, " the green, immor- 
tal shamrock ; " the brightest names in their history 
were all associated with their religion ; "Malachy of 
the collar of gold," dying in the midst of the monks, and 
clothed with their holy habit, on an island of Lough Ennel, 
near Mullingar, in -Heath ; Brian, "the great king," uphold- 
ing the crucifix before his army on the morning of Clontarf, 
and expiring in its embraces before the sun set ; the brave 
Murkertach O'Brien answering fearlessly the threat of Wil- 
liam Hufus — for when the English king said, looking towards 
Ireland, " I will bring hither my ships, and pass over and con- 
quer the land." " Hath the king," asked the Irish monarch, 
"in his great threatening said, 'if it please God?'" And 
when answered no. "Then tell him," exclaimed the Irish 
hero, " I fear him not since he putteth his trust in man and 



436 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



not in God ; " Roderick O'Connor, the last " high king" of 
Ireland, closing his career of disaster and of glory among the 
canons of the Abbey of Cong ; saint and bard and hero, all 
alike presented themselves to the national mind surrounded 
by the halo of that religion which the people were now called 
upon to abandon and despise. Powerful as was the appeal of 
history and antiquity I cannot give it any great weight in the 
preservation of Ireland's Catholicity, I do believe that adher- 
ence to ancient usages because of its antiquity is a prominent 
feature of Irish character. We are by no means so conserva- 
tive as our English neighbors. It is worthy of remark that 
usages and customs once common to both countries, and long 
since abandoned and forgotten in Ireland (Christmas " waits," 
for instance, harvest home-feasts, May-pole dances and the 
like), are still kept up faithfully and universally throughout 
England. The bells which, in Catholic times, called the peo- 
ple to early mass, on Sunday morning, are still rung out as 
of old through mere love of ancient usage, although their 
ringing from Protestant towers in the early morning has no 
meaning whatever, for it invites to no service or prayer. And 
yet, in the essential matter of religion, where antiquity itself 
is a proof of truth, the conservative English gave up the old 
faith for the new ; while the Irish — in other things so regard- 
less of antiquity — died and shed their blood for the old reli- 
gion rather than turn for one instant to the strange imposture 
of the new. 

But none of these purely natural explanations can explain 
the supernatural fact that a whole people preferred, for ten 
generations, confiscation, exile and death, rather than sur- 
render their faith ; and the true reason lies in the all-import- 
ant circumstance that the religion of the Irish people was the 
true religion of Jesus Christ, bringing not only light to the 
intelligence, but grace and strength to the heart and will of 
the nation. The light of their divine faith showed them the 
hollowness and fallacy of Protestantism, in which they rec- 
ognized an outrage upon common sense and reason, as well 
as upon God ; and the -grace of their holy Catholic religion 
enabled them to suffer and die in its defence. Here it is that 
we recognize the providence of God in the preaching of St. 
Patrick. The new and false religion assailed precisely these 
points of Catholic teachings, which he had engraved most 
deeply on the mind and heart of Ireland, as if he had antici- 
pated the trial and prepared for it. Attachment to the 
Holy See was more than a sentiment — it was a passion in the 
Irish bosom. Through good report and evil report Ireland 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



437 



was always faithful to Peter's chair, and it is a curious fact 
that when the Christian world was confused by the preten- 
sions of anti-Popes and all the nations of Christendom were, 
at one time or other, led astray, so as to acknowledge some 
false pretender, Ireland, with an instinct truly supernatural, 
never failed to discover, to proclaim, and to obey the true 
Pontiff. She is the only Catholic nation that never was for 
a moment, separated from Peter, nor mistaken in her alle- 
giance to him. Her prayer, her obedience, her love, were the 
sure inheritance of each succeeding Pope, from Celestine, 
who sent St. Patrick to Ireland, to Pius, who, in our own 
day, beheld Patrick's children guarding his venerable throne 
and prepared to die in his glorious cause. In every Catholic 
land union with Rome is a principle. In Ireland it was a 
devotion. And so, when the evil genius of Protestantism 
stalked through the land, and with loud voice demanded of 
the Irish people separation from Rome or their lives, the 
faithful people of God consented to die rather than to 
renounce the faith of their fathers transmitted to them 
through the saints. Now, I say that, in all this, we see the 
providence of God in the labor of Ireland's glorious Apostle. 
Who can deny that the religion which St. Patrick gave to 
Ireland is divine? A thousand years of sanctity, attest it ; 
three hundred years of martyrdom attest it. If men will 
deny the virtues which it creates, the fortitude which it 
inspires, let them look to the history of Ireland. If men say 
that the Catholic religion nourishes only because of the 
splendor of its ceremonial, the grandeur of its liturgy, and its 
appeal to the senses, let them look to the history of Ireland. 
What sustained the faith when Church and altar disappeared ? 
when no light burned, no organ pealed, but all was desola- 
tion for centuries ? 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Discourse delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, on Wednesday 
evening, May 1, in the Church of St. Vincent Ferrers, New York. 

"THE MONTH OF MARY." 



We are commencing this evening the devotions to the 
Blessed Virgin, to which the Church invites all her children 
during the month of May. The faithful at all seasons invoke 



438 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the mercy of God through, the intercession of the Blessed 
Virgin Mother. But more especially during this sweet month, 
the opening of the beautiful year, does our Holy Mother in- 
vite our devout thoughts and prayer to the Mother of God„ 
and put before us the Blessed Virgin's claims and titles to 
our veneration and love. Guided by this Catholic instinct 
and spirit, we are assembled here, this evening, my dear 
brethren, and it is my pleasing duty to endeavor to unfold 
before your eyes the high designs of God which were matured 
and carried on in Mary. And, first of all, I have to remark 
to you, as I have done before — that in every work of God we 
find reflected the harmony and the order which is the infinite 
beauty of God Himself. The nearer any work of His ap- 
proaches Him in excellence, in usefulness, in necessity, the 
more does that work reflect the beauty and harmony of God, 
who created it. Now, dearly beloved, the highest work that 
ever God made — that it ever entered into His mind to con- 
ceive — or that He ever executed by His omnipotence — was 
the sacred humanity, or the human nature of Jesus Christ ; 
and, next to Him, in grandeur, in sanctity, of necessity, is 
the institution of, or the creation of the Holy Catholic 
Church of God. When, therefore, we come, as pious chil- 
dren of the Church, to examine her doctrines, to meditate 
ujoon her precepts, to analyze her devotions, we naturally find 
ourselves at once in the kingdom of perfect harmony and 
order. Everything in the Church's teaching harmonizes with 
the works of the human intelligence ; everything in the 
Church's moral law harmonizes with the wants of man's soul. 
Everything in the Church's liturgy, or devotions, harmonizes 
with man's imagination and sense, in so far as that imagina- 
tion and sense help him to a union with God. And so, every- 
thing in the Church's devotion harmonizes with the nature 
around us, and within us, and with that reflection of nature 
in its highest and most beautiful form, which is in the spirit 
and in the genius of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I remember 
once speaking with a very distinguished poet — one of a 
world-wide reputation, and honorable name — a name which 
is a household word wherever the English language is spoken 
— and he said to me, " Father, I am not a Catholic, yet I have 
no keener pleasure, or greater enjoyment, than to witness 
Catholic ceremonial, to study Catholic devotion, to investi- 
gate Catholic doctrines — nor do I find," said he, "in all that 
nature, or the resources of intellect open before me, greater 
food for poetic and enthusiastic thought than that which is 
suggested to me by the Catholic Church." And so it is not 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



439 



without some beautiful reason — some beautiful, harmonious 
reason — that the Church is able to account for every iota 3 
and every tittle of her liturgy, and of her devotions. 

And, now, we find the Church, upon this, the first of May, 
calling all her pious and spiritual-minded children, and tell- 
ing them, that this month is devoted, in an especial manner, 
to the Blessed Virgin Mary. What month is this, my dearly 
beloved ? It is the month in the year when the Spring puts 
forth all its life, and all the evidences of those hidden powers 
that lie latent in this world of ours. You have all seen the 
face of nature at Christmas time, during Lent, even at 
Easter-time, this year — and looking around you, it seemed as 
if the earth was never to produce a green blade of grass 
again. You looked upon the trees, no leaf gave evidence 
there of life. All was lifeless, all was barren, all was dried 
up. And to a man who opened his eyes but yesterday, with- 
out the experience of past years, and of past summers, it 
would seem to him as if it were impossible that this cold, 
and barren, and winter-stricken earth could ever burst again 
into the life, the verdure, the beauty, and promise of spring. 
But the clouds rained down the rain of heaven, and the sun 
shone forth with the warmth of spring, and suddenly all 
nature is instinct with life. 

Xow the corn-fields sprout and tell us that in a few months 
they will teem with the abundance of the harvest. Xow, the 
meadow, dried up, and burned, and withered, and yellow, and 
leafless, clothes itself with a green mantle, robing hill and dale 
with the beauty of nature, and refreshing the eye of man and 
every beast of the field that feeds thereon. Xow the trees 
that seemed to be utterly dried, and sapless, and leafless, and 
motionless, save so far as they swayed sadly to and fro to 
every winter blast that passed over them — are clothed with 
the fair young buds of spring, most delicate and delightful to 
the eye and to the heart of man, promising in the little leaf 
of to-day the ample spread and the deep shade of the thick 
summer foliage that is to come upon them. Kow, the birds 
of the air, silent during the winter months, begin their song. 
The lark rises on his wing to the upper air ; and, as he rises, 
he pours out his song in ether, until he fills the whole atmos- 
phere with the thrill of his delicious harmony. Xow, every 
bud expands, and every leaf opens, and every spray of plant 
and tree, sensd forth its spring-song, and hails with joy the 
Summer, and all nature is instinct with life. How beautiful 
is the harmony of our devotion and our worship — how deli- 
cate, how natural, how beautiful the idea of our Holy Mother, 



440 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the Church, in selecting this month — this month of promise — 
this month of spring — this month of gladness — of serene sky 
and softened temperature — this month opening the Summer, 
the glad time of the year, and dedicating it to her who repre- 
sents, indeed, the order of grace, the spring-time of man's re- 
demption ; opening the summer of the sunshine of God, the 
first sign of the purest life that this earth was able to send 
forth under the eyes of God and man ! Oh, how long and 
how sad was the winter ! — the winter of God's wrath — the 
winter of four thousand years, during which the sunshine of 
God's favor was shut out from this world by the thick clouds 
of man's sin, and of God's anger ! How sad was that winter 
that seemed never to be able to break into the genial spring 
of God's grace, and of His holy favor and virtue again ! No 
sunbeam of divine truth illumined its darkness. No smile of 
divine favor gladdened the face of the spiritual world for 
these four thousand years. 

The earth seemed dead and accursed, incapable of bringing 
forth a single flower of promise, or sending forth a single leaf 
of such beauty that it might be fit to be culled by the loving 
hand of God, But, when the summer-time was about to 
come — when the thick clouds began to part — the clouds of 
anger, the clouds of sin — the cloud of the curse was broken 
and rent asunder, and gave place to the purer cloud of mercy 
and of grace, that bowed down from heaven, overladen with 
the rain and dew of God's redemption, — then the earth 
moved itself to life in the sunshine, and the first flower of 
hope, the first fair thing that this earth produced for four 
thousand years, in the breaking of winter, before the sum- 
mer, in the promise of Spring, was the immaculate lily, the 
fairest flower that bloomed upon the root of Jesse, and in its 
bloom sent forth pure leaves ; and so fragrant were they, that 
their sweet odor penetrated heaven, and moved the desires of 
the Most High God to enjoy them, according to the word of 
the prophet. " Send forth flowers as the lily, and yield a 
sweet odor, and put forth leaves unto grace." So bright in 
its opening was this spiritual flower — the first flower of earih 
— that even the eye of God, looking down upon it, could see 
no speck or stain upon the whiteness of its unfolding leaves. 
" Thou art all fair, my Beloved ! " he exclaimed, " and there 
is no spot or stain upon thee." And this flower — this spring 
flower — this sacred plant — that was to rear its gentle head, 
unfold its white leaves, and show its petals of purest gold, 
was Mary, who was destined from all eternity to be the moth- 
er of Jesus Christ. She was the earth's spring, full of prom- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



441 



ise, full of beauty, full of joy ; she was the earth's spring that 
was to be the herald of the coming summer, and of the full, 
unclouded light of God's own sun beaming upon her. And, 
just as the little leaf that comes forth in the corn-field to-day, 
holds in its tiny bosom the promise of the full ear of wheat, 
bending its rich, autumnal head, the staff of life to all men, so 
Mary's coming, from the beginning, was a herald and a 
promise of His appearance upon the earth — was the announce- 
ment that that little plant was to grow and endure, until it 
was to be crowned with the purity of God, and to bring forth 
the bread of life, the manna of heaven, the bread of angels, 
Jesus Christ, the world's Redeemer, the Word made flesh. 

How well, therefore, dearly beloved brethren, how well 
does not this fair spring month of May, this opening of the 
summer of the year, testify in nature what Mary was in the 
order of grace. And just as the Almighty God clothes this 
month in the order of nature with every beauty, fills the 
fields with fragrance, clothes the hill-sides with the varied 
garb of beauty that nature puts forth, so tender, so fair in its 
early promise, so, also, the Almighty God clothed the spring 
— the spiritual spring of man's redemption, which was Mary, 
in every form of religious beauty, and robed her in every 
richest garb of divine loveliness of which a creature was 
capable ; so that every gift in God's hand that a human crea- 
ture was capable of receiving, Mary received. For, in her 
the word of my text was fulfilled. It was a strange promise, 
beloved ; a strange and a startling word that came from the 
inspired lips of the Psalmist, as he said, speaking of His 
chosen : " I have said : You are God's, and all of you the 
sons of the Most High !'" That word was never fulfilled 
until the Son of the Most High became the son of a woman. 
This was the meaning of St. Augustine, when he says : " God 
came down from heaven in order that He might bring man 
from earth to heaven, and make him even as God." Thus it 
was that man, in the Child of Mary, united with God, became 
the son of the Most High. Thus it was that, in virtue of the 
union of the human and divine which took place in Mary, we 
have all received, by the grace of adoption, the faculty to 
become children of God. " But to as many as received Him," 
says St. John, "to them did He give the power to be made 
the sons of God." And this was the essential mission, the 
inherent idea of Christianity — to make men the sons of God ; 
to make you and me the sons of God, by infusing into us the 
spirit of Jesus Christ, and bringing forth, in our lives, and in 
our actions, and in our thoughts ? and in our inner souls, as 



4<£2 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



well as in the outer man, the graces and glorious gifts that 
Jesus Christ brought down to our humanity in Mary's womb. 
Never has this idea been lost to the Catholic Church. 

My friends and brethren, you are living now in the midst 
of strangers. You hear the wildest theories propounded 
every day in philosophy, in science ; but in nothing are the 
theories or the vagaries of the human mind so strange as 
when they take the form of religious speculation or rel.gious 
doubt. The notion prevalent among all men outside of the 
Catholic Church now-a-days is, that man has within him, natur- 
ally, without the action of God, without the action of Christ, 
the seeds of the perfection of his life ; that, by his own efforts, 
and by his own study, and by what is called the spirit of 
progress, a man may attain to the perfection of his own being 
without God, and become all that God intended him to 
become. That notion is antagonistic and destructive of the 
. very first vital principle of Christianity. The vital principle 
of Christianity is this : the Son of God came down from 
heaven and became man, and the child, the true child, of a 
woman, in order that mankind, in Him and through Him, 
might be able to clothe itself with His virtues, and so become 
like God. And in that likeness to God lies the whole perfec- 
tion of our being ; and the end of Christianity is to bring 
every sufficient agency to bear upon man ; and to make that 
man like to God ; to make him as the Son of God. " I have 
said, ' Ye are Gods, and all of you sons of the Most High !' " 
God is a God of truth. Man must be a man of truth in order 
to be like to God. God possesses the truth. He does not 
seek for it. He has it. He does not go groping, sophistica- 
ting, and thinking, and arguing in order to come at the 
truth. Truth is God Himself. And so, in like manner, man, 
to be a child of God, must have the truth, and not look for 
it. God is sanctity and purity in Himself. Man must be 
holy and pure in order to be made the son of God. He 
must be free from sin in order to be like to God, the Father. 
He must have a power over his passions to restrain them, to 
be pure in thought, in word, and in action, in soul and in 
body, before he can be made like to the Son of God. And 
that religion alone, which has the truth and gives it; which 
has grace and gives it ; which touches sin and destroys it ; 
which enables the soul to conquer the body ; which holds 
up in her sanctuaries the types of that purity which is the 
highest reflection of the infinite purity of Jesus Christ — that 
religion alone can be the true religion of God. Every other 
religion is a lie. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



443 



But the world is unable to believe this. Men compromise 
with their passions. Men go to a certain extent in satisfying 
their evil inclinations. Men refuse to accept the truth because 
the truth humbles them. Hence the Protestant maxim : 
" Read the Bible, read the Bible, and don't listen to any 
priest ! These Catholics are a priest-ridden people. What- 
ever the priest says in the Church is law with the Catholics." 
They refuse the humility of this. They won't take the 
truth. They must find it for themselves ; and the man who 
sees it, by the very fact of seeking it shows, he is not the son 
of God. I say this much, because, my dear friends, I wish 
you to guard against the wild, reckless spirit that is abroad 
in the world to-day ; I wish to guard you in your fidelity to 
the Church of God, your mother ; in your fidelity to her 
teaching, in your fidelity to her sacraments ; that word that 
she puts on my lips and such as me — that sacramental grace 
that she puts into the hands of the priest for you ; these are 
the elements of your salvation ; these are the means by which 
every one of you may become the child of God ; and there 
is no perfection, no scheme of perfection, no secret of success, 
no plan of progress outside of this that is not an institution 
of the enemy, a delusion, a mockery, and a snare. And all 
this we get through Mary, because Mary was the chosen in- 
strument in the hands of God to give Him that human nature 
in which man was made, even to the Son of God. Mary's 
coming upon the earth, therefore, was a spring-time of grace. 
Mary's appearance in this world was like the morning star, 
when, in the morning, after the darkness and tempest of the 
night, the sailor, standing upon the prow of the ship, looks 
around to find the eastern point of the horizon, and he sees, 
suddenly rising out of the eastern wave, a silver star, beauti- 
ful in its pure beauty, trembling as if it were a living thing. 
And he knows that there is the east, for this is the morning 
star. He knows that precisely in that point, in a few 
moments, the sun will rise in all his splendor, and he knows 
that that sun is coming because the herald that proclaims 
the sun has risen. The morning star proclaims to the wild 
wanderer on the deep, in the eastern horizon, the advent of 
the coming day. So with us, upon the wild and angry 
waves of sin and of error, and of God's anger and curse, our 
poor humanity, shipwrecked in the garden of Eden, — our 
poor humanity, without even the wreck left to us of the sarac- 
ment of penance ; our poor humanity, groping in the sacri- 
fices and in the oblations of the world, for the love of God, 
the Redeemer, the day-star, whose light was to illumine the 



444 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



darkness of the world — beholds, suddenly, the morning star 
rise, the pale, trembling, silver beauty of Mary ! Then it 
was known that speedily, and in a few years, the world would 
behold its Redeemer, and mankind would be saved in the 
fulness of Mary's time. Therefore it is, that she enters so 
largely into the scheme and plan of redemption, that the 
Almighty God willed that, even as the name of Jesus Christ 
was to be made known to all men, was to be glorified of all 
men, was to be proclaimed as the only name under heaven 
by which man was to be saved ; so, also, side by side with 
this purpose of God's declaration of the glory of His divine 
Son, came the prophecy of Mary, from the same spirit, that 
wherever the name of Jesus Christ was heard and revered, 
that there, and to the ends of the earth, all generations were 
to call her blessed. " He that is mighty hath wrought great 
things in me," she says ; "Wherefore, behold, henceforth all 
generations shall call me blessed." 

And now, my friends, going back to the fountain-head of 
our Christianity, going back to the earliest traditions of the 
Church of God, examining, with the light of human scrutiny, 
her spirit, as manifested in the earliest ages of her being, in 
the earliest documents she presents us with, does not every 
man find that wherever the true religion of Christ was propa- 
gated, wherever there was the genius and the instinct of faith 
that adored Jesus Christ, there came the fellow-instinct and 
genius that loved, and revered, and venerated, and honored 
the woman who was His mother. 

If every other proof of this was wanting, there is one 
proof— a most emphatic proof — and it is this : that while the 
blessed Virgin Mary was yet living during the twelve years 
that elapsed before her assumption into heaven, a religious 
order was organized in the Catholic Church, devoted to the 
veneration, and the love, and the honor of the Blessed Virgin. 
A religious order dating from the earliest times of the pro- 
phets — a religious order founded by the sons of the prophets, 
under the Jewish dispensation, was converted to Christianity, 
and at once banded itself together and called itself "The 
Brethren of our Lady of Mount Carmel." No sooner was 
our Lady assumed into heaven, than these men spread them- 
selves through Palestine and through the East, and the bur- 
den of their teaching and their devotion was the glory 
of the Mother of God ; the woman who brought forth 
the Man-God, Jesus Christ. No sooner was the Gospel 
preached than the devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary spread 
with the rapidity of thought, of sentiment, and of love, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



445 



through all distant parts ; and when five hundred years later 
a man rose up and denied that Mary was the mother of God 
we read that when the Church assembled at Ephesus in gener- 
al council, the people came from all the surrounding countries, 
and the great city of Ephesus was overcrowded with the anx- 
ious people, all waiting for the result of the deliberations, 
and all praying ; and when, at last, the Council of the Holy 
Church of God put forth its edict, declaring that Mary was 
the true Mother of God, we read of the joy that came from 
the people's hearts, the cry of delight that ran from their lips, 
the "All Hail!" that they gave to you, Mother in Heaven, 
spread throughout her universal Church, and, never among 
the many conclusions of her councils for eighteen hundred 
years, never did the holy Catholic Church give greater joy to 
the children, than when she proclaimed, in the fifth century, 
that Mary was the Mother of God, and in the 19th century, 
that Mary was conceived without sin. But as we are enter- 
ing upon this May's devotions, I wish, dearly beloved, to bring 
unto your notice this very devotion of the Month of Mary as 
a wonderful instance of the rapidity with which this devotion 
to the Mother of God spread throughout the Catholic 
Church. 

It was at the beginning of this present century that this 
devotion of the Month of Mary sprang up in the Roman 
Catholic Church ; and the circumstances of its origin are most 
wonderful. Some seventy years ago, or thereabouts, a little 
child — a poor little child — scarcely come to reason, on a beau- 
tiful evening in May, knelt down, and began to lisp with 
childish voice the Litany of the Blessed Virgin before the 
image of the child in the arms of the Madonna in one of the 
streets in Rome. One little child in Rome, moved by an im- 
pulse that we cannot account for — apparently a childish f j eak 
— knelt down in the public streets and began saying the litany 
that he heard sung in the Church. The next evening he was 
there again at the same hour, and began singing his little lit- 
any again. Another little child, a little boy, on his passage 
stopped and began singing the responses. The next evening 
three or four other children came apparently for amusement, 
and knelt before the same image of the Blessed Virgin, and 
sang their litany. After a time— after a few evenings — some 
pious women, the mothers of the children, delighted to see 
the early piety of their sons and daughters, came along with 
them, and knelt down, and blended their voices in the litany; 
and a priest of a neighboring church said: " Come into the 
Chruch and I will light a few candles on the altar of the 



446 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Blessed Virgin, and we will all sing the litany together. 5 * 
And so they went into the Church ; lighted up the candles, 
and knelt, and there they sang the litany. He spoke a few 
words to them of the Blessed Virgin, about her patience, 
about her love for her Divine Son, and about the dutiful vener- 
ation in which she was held by her Son. From that hour 
the devotion of the month of May spread throughout the 
whole Catholic world ; until within a few years, wherever 
there was a Catholic Church, a Catholic altar, a Catholic 
priest, or a Catholic to hear and respond to the litany, the 
month of May became the month of Mary, the month of 
devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Is not this wonderful ? Is 
not this perfectly astonishing? How naturally the idea came 
home to the Catholic mind ! With what love it has been 
kept up ! How congenial it was to the soil saturated with 
the Divine grace through the intelligence, as illumined by 
Divine knowledge and Divine faith ! Does it not remind 
you of that wonderful passage in the Book of Kings, where 
the prophet Elias went up into the mountain-top, when for 
three years it had not rained on the land, and the land was 
dried up ; and he went up on the solitary summit of the 
mount, there to breath a prayer to God to send rain upon the 
land. 

While he was praying in a cave in the rock, he told his 
servant to stand upon the summit of the mountain, and to 
watch all around, and to give him notice when he saw a cloud. 
The servant watched, and returned seven times " and at the 
seventh time behold a little cloud arose out of the sea like a 
man's foot .... and while he turned himself this way and 
that way behold the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, 
and there fell a great rain." 

The word " Mary," means the sea — the star of the sea. A 
few years ago, a cloud of devotion, no larger than the foot of 
a little child, in Rome, was seen, and while men looked this 
way and that way, it spreads over the whole horizon of the 
Church of God, and over the whole world, and then, breaking 
into a rain of grace and intercession, it brings an element of 
purity, and grace, and dignity, and every gift of God to every 
Catholic soul throughout the world. Oh ! when I think of 
the women that I have met in the dear old land of Faith !— 
the woman oppresed from one cause or from another ! — some 
with sickness in the house ; some with, perhaps, a dissolute 
son ; some with a drunken husband ; some with the fear of 
some great calamity, or of poverty, coming upon them ; some 
apprehensive of bad news from those that they love ; — how 



THE CATHOLTo MISSION. 



447 



often have I seen them coming to me in the month of May, 
just in the beginning, and brightening up, thank God, and 
say, the month is come ! I know, she in Heaven will pray for 
me, and that my prayers will be heard ! And I have seen 
them so often coming before the end of the month, to tell 
me with the light of joy in their eyes, that the Mother heard 
their prayers, and that their petitions were granted ; then 
was I reminded of that mysterious cloud that broke out in 
the heavens, and rained down the saving rain. 

One have I before me — one whom I knew and loved — a 
holy nun who, for more than fifty years, had served God in 
angelic purity, and in heroic sacrifice. For seven months she 
was confined to a bed of pain and of suffering that deepened 
into agony. And during those seven months, her prayer to 
God was, while suffering, to increase those sufferings ; — not 
to let her leave the world until one, whom she loved dearly, 
and who was leading a bad and reckless life, should be con- 
verted unto God. "Weeks passed into months, and month fol- 
lowed month, and most frequently did I sit at the bedside of 
rnyholy friend. Month followed month for seven long, dreary 
months, and she spent that time upon the cross, truly, with 
Jesus Christ. But when the first day of May came — the 
month of Mary — I came and knelt down by her bedside, to 
cheer her with prayer and with sympathy. She said to me, 
"I feel that the month is come that will give me joy and re- 
lief. It is Mary's month, and it is the month when prayer 
grows most powerful in Heaven, because it is the month in 
which the Mother will especially hear our prayers." Before 
that month was over, he for whom she prayed was converted 
to God, with all the fervor of a true conversion ; and when 
the month was drawing to a close, the sacrifice of pain and 
suffering was accepted, and she who began the month in sor- 
row, ended it with the joys of Jesus Christ and his Virgin 
Mother. So it is all the world over. His secret graces are 
poured out at the instance of Mary's prayer. And even as 
she was the spring-time of grace upon earth, so is she even 
now in Heaven, by her prayer for us the spring-time of holy 
grace, obtaining for us the grace of repentance, the grace of 
prayer, the grace of temperance, the grace and power of 
self-restraint — in a word, whatever grace we demand, that, 
springing up in our souls will produce to-day the flower and 
leaf of promise — to morrow, the fruit of maturity — and for 
eternity, the reward of grace which is the everlasting crown 
of God's glory. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered by the Rev. Father Burke in the Brooklyn 
Academy of Music, on Wednesday, April 24.] 



THE POPE : AND THE CROWN WHICH HE WEARS. 



Sir Friends : You are here, as an illustration of the old 
proverb, that a man can get used to anything. We say in 
Ireland that the eels get used -to being skinned. (Laughter.) 
I have heard of a man who was seven times tossed by a mad 
ox, and he swore on the Four Evangelists that he was tossed 
so often that he got to like it. The last time that I was in 
this great hall, when I looked up and saw the mass of friends 
that were around me, I confess that I was a little frightened. 
This evening I have got used to it. (Laughter.) I have 
also got used to your kindness ; I got used to it — yes, and I 
hope I shall never abuse it. 

We are assembled this evening, my dear friends, to con- 
template the greatest work of all the works that the Almighty 
God ever created — namely, The Constitution oe the Holt 
Catholic Church. (Applause.) In every work of God it 
has been well observed that the Creator's mind shows itself 
in the wonderful harmony that we behold in all His works. 
Therefore, the poet has justly said that " Order is Heaven's 
first law." But if this be true of earthly things, how much 
more truly wonderful does that harmony of God, in the order 
which is the very expression of the Divine mind, come forth 
and appear when we come to contemplate the glorious 
Church which Jesus Christ first founded upon this earth. 
The glorious Church I call her, and in using those words I 
only quote the inspired Scriptures of God; for we are told 
that this Church, which Christ the Lord established, is a glc^ 
lions Church, without spot or speck or wrinkle, or any such 
thing, or defect of any kind, but all perfect, all glorious, and 
fit to be what He intended Her to be — the immaculate spouse 
of the Son of God. (Applause.) 

aSTow, that our Divine Redeemer intended to establish such 
a Church upon the earth is patent from the repeated words of 
the Lord Himself; for it will appear that one of the strongest 
intentions that was in the mind of the Redeemer, and one of 
the primary conceptions of His wisdom, was to establish upon 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



449 



this earth a Church, of which He speaks, over and over 
again, saying, " I will build ray Church, so that the gates of 
hell shall never prevail against it" " He that will not hear the 
voice of the Church, let him be as if he were a heathen or an 
infidel." And so, throughout the Gospels, we find theSqm of 
God again and again alluding to His Church, proclaiming 
what that Church was to be and set upon her the signs by 
which all men were to know her as a patent and self-evident 
fact among the nations of the world until the end of time, 
(applause). And what idea does our Lord give us of His 
Church? He tells us, first of all, and tells us over and over 
again, that His Church is to be a kingdom, and he calls it 
"My Kingdom." And elsewhere, in repeated portions of the 
Gospel, He speaks of it as "The Kingdom of God," and one 
time He says, "The Kingdom of God is like unto a city, 
which was built upon the mountainside, so that all men might 
behold it." And again, " The Kingdom of God is like unto 
a cand'le set upon the candlestick, so that it might shed its 
light throughout the whole house, and that everyone entering 
the house might behold it." And again, " The kingdom of 
God is like a net cast into the sea, and sweeping in all that 
comes in its way — fish, good and bad. And so throughout 
Christ, always speaks of His Church as a kingdom that He 
has to establish upon this earth. "When, therefore any medi- 
tative, thoughtful man reads the Scriptures reverently unim- 
passionedly, without a film of prejudice over his eyes, he must 
come to the conclusion that Christ, beyond all doubt, founded 
a spiritual kingdom upon this earth, and that that kingdom 
was so founded as to be easily recognized by all men. Now, 
if we once let into our minds the idea that the Church of 
Christ is a kingdom, we must at once admit into the idea of 
the Church an organization which is necessary for every king- 
dom upon this earth. And what is the first element of a na- 
tion ? I answer that the first element of a nation is to have 
a head or ruler. Call him what you will — elect him as you 
will. Is it a republic? it must have a president. Is it a 
monarchy ? it must have its king. Is it an empire ? it must 
have its emperor ; and so on. But the moment you imagine 
a State or a kingdom of any kind without a head, that mo- 
ment you destroy out of your mind the very idea of a State 
united for certain purposes and governed by certain known 
and acknowledged ideas called laws. That head of the Nation 
must be the supreme tribunal of the nation. From him in 
his executive office, all subordinate officers hold their power; 
and, even though he be elected by the people and chosen from 



450 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



among the people, the moment lie is set at the head of the 
State or Nation, that moment he is the representative or em- 
bodiment of the fountain of authority. Every one wielding 
power within that Nation must bow to him. Everyone exer- 
cising jurisdiction within the Nation must derive it from him. 
lie, I say again may derive it, even from the choice of the 
people ; but when he is thus elevated he forms one unit, to 
which everything in the State is bound to look up. This is 
the first idea and notion which the word State or Kingdom 
involves. It follows, therefore, that, if the Church founded 
by Christ be a Kingdom, the Church must have a head ; and 
if you can imagine a Church without a head, yet retaining 
its consistancy, its strength, its unity and its usefulness, for 
any purpose for which it was created, you can imagine a thing 
that it is impossible to my mind, or to the mind of any reas- 
onable man, to conceive. Luther imagined it, when he broke 
up the Nations of the earth with his Protestant heresy, when 
he rent asunder the sacred garment of unity that girded the 
fair form of the holy Church the Spouse of God. When he 
broke up the Church, he was obliged to establish the principle 
of headship. The Church of England had her head; the 
Church of Denmark had her head — that is to say, her fountain 
of jurisdiction, her ruling authority, her unity, the existence 
of which in all these States we see, with at least the appear- 
ance of religion, kept up — the phantasm of a real Church. 
It is true, my friends, when you come to analyze these different 
heads that spring up from the different Protestant Churches 
in the various countries of Europe, we shall find some among 
them that I believe here, in America would be called " sore- 
heads." (Applause.) Harry the Eight was a remarkable 
sorehead. Perhaps, if he had got a good combing from the 
Almighty God in this world, he would not get so bad a comb- 
ing as he is, in all probability, receiving where he now is. 
(Applause.) 

We next come to the question : Who is the head of the 
Church of Christ ? Who is the ruler? Before I answer this 
question, my friends, I will ask you to rise, in imagination 
and thought, to the grandeur of the idea that fills the mind 
with the unfathomable wisdom of God, when He was laying 
the foundations and sinking them deeply into the earth — the 
foundations of His Church. What .purpose had Christ, the 
Son of God, in view that He should establish the Church at 
all? He answers, and tells us really, that He had two dis, 
tinct purposes in view, and that it was the destiny of the 
Church which He was about to found, to make these pur- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



451 



poses known and carry them out, and with the extension of 
them to spread herself and be faithful unto the consummation 
of the world. What were these purposes ? The first of these 
was to enlighten the world and dispel darkness by the light 
of her teachings. Wherefore He said to His Apostles, " You 
are the light of the world. Let your light shine before men 
that all men may see you, and seeing you may give glory to 
your Father, who is in heaven." "You are the light of the 
world," He says. "A man does not light a candle and put it 
under a bushel, but sets it up in a candlestick, that it may 
illumine the whole house, and that all men entering may 
behold it. So I say unto you, you are the light of the world 
and the illumination of all ages." This was the first purpose 
for which Christ founded His Church. The world was in 
darkness. Every light had beamed upon it, but in vain. 
The light of pagan philosophy, even the highest human 
knowledge, had beamed forth from Plato, and from the phi- 
losophers, but it was unable to penetrate the thick veil that 
overshadowed the intellect and the genius of men, and to 
illumine that intelligence with one ray of celestial or divine 
truth. (Applause.) The light of genius had beamed upon it. 
The noblest works of art this earth ever beheld were raised 
before the admiring eyes of the pagans of the world, but 
neither the pencil of Praxetiles, nor the chisel of Phidias 
bringing forth the highest forms of artistic beauty were able 
to elevate the mind of the pagan to one pure thought of the 
God who made him. Every human light had tried in vain to 
dispel this thick cloud of darkness. The light of God alone 
could do it, and that light came with Jesus Christ from 
heaven. Wherefore He said : " I am the light of the world ; 
and "in Him," says the Evangelist, "was life and the life 
was the light of men." 

The next mission of the Church was not only to illumine 
the darkness, but to heal the corruption of the world, which 
had grown literally rotten in the festering of its own spirit" 
ual ulcers, until every form that human crime can take was 
not only established among men, but acknowledged among 
them — crowned among them; not only acknowledged and 
avowed, but actually lifted up upon their altars and deified in 
the midst of them, so that men were taught to adore a God — 
the shameful impersonation of their own licentiousness, de- 
bauchery and sin. Terrible was the moral condition of the 
world when the hand of an angry God was forced to draw 
back the flood-gates of heaven and sweep away the corrup- 
tion which prevailed through the flesh, until the spiritual 



452 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



God beheld no vestige of his resemblance left in man. Ter- 
rible was the corruption when the same hand was obliged 
once more to be put forth, and down from the heaven of 
heavens came a rain of living fire, and burned up a whole 
nation because they were corrupt ! Terrible was the corrup- 
tion when the Almighty God called upon every pure-minded 
man to draw the sword in the name of the God of Israel and 
smite his neighbor and his friend, until a whole nation was 
swept away from out the twelve tribes of Israel ! Christ was 
sent as our head, and He came and found a world one fester- 
ing and corrupt ulcerous sore ; and he laid upon it the saving 
salve of his mercy, and he declared that he was the purifier 
of society ; and to his disciples he said : " You are not only 
the life of the world to dispel its darkness, but you are the 
salt of the earth to heal and sweeten and to preserve a cor- 
rupt and a fallen nature." (Applause). This is the second 
great mission of the Church of God, to heal with her sacra- 
mental touch, to purify with her holy grace, to wipe away 
the corruption, and to prevent its return by laying the heal- 
ing influence of divine grace there. This is the mission of 
the Church of God — which was Christ's — to be unto the end 
of time the light of the world and the salt of the earth. And 
from this two-fold office of the Church of God, I argue that 
God himself — the God who founded her, the God who estab- 
lished her in so much glory and for so high and holy a pur- 
pose, the God who made her and created her his fairest and 
most beautiful work — that God must remain with her, and be 
her true head unto the end of time. And why ? Who is the 
light of the world ? I am, says Jesus Christ. Who is the 
purifier of the world ? I am, responds the same Christ. If 
then thou Christ be the purifier of the earth and the light 
of the world, tell us, O Master, can light, or grace, or purity 
come from any other source than Thee ? He answers no ; 
the man who seeks it but in Me finds for his light, darkness, 
and for his healing, corruption and death. The man who 
plants upon any other soil than mine, plants indeed, but the 
heavenly Father's hand shall pluck out what he plants. 
Christ, therefore, is the true head of His Church, the abiding 
head of His Church, the unfailing, ever watchful head of His 
Church, and is as much to-day the head of the Church as He 
was 1800 years ago. Christ to-day is the real head, the abid- 
ing head. He rose from the dead after He had lain three 
days in darkness. He had said to his Apostles : "I am 
about to leave you, but it will only be for a little ; a little 
while and you shall not see me any more, but after a very 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



458 



little while you shall see me again, and then I will not leave 
you orphans. I will come to you again, and I will remain 
with you all days unto the consummation of the world." 
(Applause). Oh ! my friends, what a consoling thought this 
unfailing promise of the words of the Redeemer. Oh ! what 
what a consolation has this world in Him, who said : 
" Heaven and earth shall pass away — My Word shall never 
pass away; I am with you all days unto the consummation 
of the world." And how is He with us ? Is he with us 
visibly ? No. Do we behold him with our eyes ? No. Do 
we hear his own immediate voice? No. Have any of you 
ever seen Him or heard Him immediately and directly as 
John the Evangelist saw Him when He was upon the cross ; 
as Mary heard Him when He said to her, " I am the resur- 
rection and the life." No. Yet He founded a visible king- 
dom, a kingdom which was to be set upon the earth, as a 
candle set upon the candlestick. Therefore if He is at the 
head of that kingdom, if He is to preside over it, if He is to 
rule and govern it, a visible kingdom, He must show him- 
self visibly. This he does not. In His second and abiding 
coming He hides himself within the golden gates of the 
Tabernacle, and there He abides and remains ; but when it 
was a question of governing His church, Christ our Lord 
himself appointed a visible head. And who was this ? He 
called twelve men around Him ; He gave them power and 
jurisdiction ; He gave them the glorious mission of the Apos- 
tles ; He gave them a communication of His own spirit ; He 
gave them inspiration. He breathed his Holy Spirit, the 
Third Person of the blessed Trinity, upon them, and He took 
one of the twelve, and He spoke to one man three most im- 
portant words. They were meant for that one man alone, 
and the proof is that on each occasion when Christ spake to 
them He called the twelve around Him, and He spoke to 
that one man alone in the presence of the other eleven, and 
that there might be eleven witnesses to the privileges and 
the power of the one. Who was that one man ? St. Peter. 
St. Peter was chosen among the Apostles. St. Peter, not up 
to that time the one that was most loved, for John was tho 
disciple whom Jesus loved ; St. Peter whom, more thar any 
of the others, was reproved by his Lord, in the severest 
terms. 

St. Peter who, almost more than any of the others, and more 
than any of the others who were faithful, showed his weak- 
ness until the confirming power of the Holy Ghost came upon 
him. Peter was the one chosen, and here are the three words 



454 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



which Christ spoke. First of all He said. " Thou art the 
rock upon whom I shall "build My church." Christ heard 
the people speaking of him, and He said, " Who do they say 
I am ? " and the Apostles answered, "Lord some of them say 
you are Jeremiah, and some of them say you are J ohn the 
Baptist.' Then Christ asked them solemnly, "Who do you 
say I am ? " Down went Peter on his knees, and cried out, 
« thou art Christ, the Son of the Living God." Then Christ 
our Lord said to him, " Blessed art thou, Simon, son of John, 
because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my 
Father, who is in heaven. And I say to thee that thou art 
Cephas, and upon this rock I will build my church." (Ap- 
plause.) The man who denies to Peter the glorious and won- 
derful privilege of being the visible foundation underlying 
the church of God and upholding it, is untrue to Christ the 
head of the Church. 

The second word that the Son of God spoke to Peter was 
this: "To thee, oh Peter," he says, in the presence of the 
others, " To thee, oh Peter, do I give the keys of the kingdom 
of heaven. Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth shall be 
bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth 
shall be loosed in heaven." He gave his promise to them all, 
but to Peter, singly he said : " To thee do I give the keys of 
the kingdom of heaven." That is, the supreme power over 
the Church. On another occasion, Christ, our Lord, spoke to 
Peter, and the others were present, and he said to him, " Peter, 
behold, the devil has asked for thee, that he might grind thee 
like powder and oh, Peter I have prayed for thee, that thy 
faith fail not, and do thou, oh Peter being confirmed in thy 
faith, confirm thy brethren." 

Now, any man who denies to Peter in the Church, that 
eternal Kingdom that is never to come to an end, and to Pe- 
ter and his successors, the power over his brethren to confirm 
them in the faith which shall never fail, in the faith which 
was the subject of the prayer of the Son of God to His Father 
—any man who denies the supremacy of Peter gives the lie to 
Jesus Christ (loud applause). 

Then on another solemn occasion on which the Son of 
God spoke to Peter, when He was preparing to bid His 
apostles and disciples a last farewell. They had seen Him 
crucified ; they had seen Him lie disfigured, mangled in the 
silent tomb. From that tomb, with a power which was all 
His own, He rose like the lightning of God to the heavens, 
sending before Him, howling and shrieking, all the demons 
of hell, conquered and subdued. Xow, His Apostles gath 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



455 



ered about Him. Suddenly a flash lights up the heavens, and 
He appears in their midst. Then He goes straight to Peter ; 
they were all there : He goes straight to Peter and He says : 
" Simon Peter, do you love me more than all these ? " Peter 
did not know what He meant, and he said, " Lord. I love 
you." A second time, after a pause, an awful pause, the Son 
of God said: "Simon, son of John, lovest thou me more 
than these ? " Peter said, u Lord, I love thee." 

Another dreadful, awful pause, and a third time He raised 
his voice, and letting the majesty of God flash out from Him, 
he says : " Simon, son of John, lovest thou me more than 
these ? " And then Peter, bursting into tears, said : ' ; Lord, 
thou knowest all things — thou knowest that I love thee." 
Then said the Redeemer, " Feed my lames, feed my sheep." 
(Applause). Elsewhere the same Redeemer said, lt There 
shall be but one fold and one shepherd," and He laid his hand 
upon the head of Peter and said, ' : Thou art Peter, the son 
of John, be thou the shepherd of the one fold — feed my 
lambs and feed my sheep." He who denies, therefore, to 
Peter, and Peter's successor, whoever he is, the one head- 
ship, the one office, and the one shepherd in the one fold of 
God, gives the lie to Jesus Christ, the God of Truth. "Well, 
the day of the Ascension came. For forty days did Christ 
remain discoursing with His Apostles, instructing them con- 
cerning the kingdom of God, and when the forty days were 
over He led them forth from Jerusalem into the silent, beauti- 
ful mountain of Olives, and there, as they were around Him, 
and He was speaking to them, and telling them of things 
concerning the Kingdom of God — that is, the Church — 
slowly, wonderfully, majestically they beheld His figure rise 
from the earth, and as it rose above their heads it caught a 
new glory and splendor that was shed down upon it from the 
broken and the rent heavens above. They followed Him 
with their eyes. They saw Him pass from ring to ring of 
light. Their ears caught the music of the nine choirs of 
heaven, of millions of angels who from the clouds saluted 
the coming Lord. They strained their eyes and their hands 
after Him. They lifted up their voices saying, as did they 
of old to Elias ; Oh ! thou chariot of Israel ! wilt thou leave 
us now and abandon us forever ? And from the clouds that 
wen? surrounding Him he waved to them His last blessing, 
and their straining eyes caught the last lustre and brightness 
of His figure as it disappeared in the empyrean of heaven 
and was caught up to the throne of God. Then an angel 
flashed into their presence, and said : <; Ye men of Galilee, 



456 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



why stand ye here looldng up to the heavens, to behold Jesus 
of Nazareth ? I say to you, you shall behold him coming 
from heaven, even as he has gone into heaven this, day." 
And the eleven disciples bent their knees to Peter, the living 
representative of the supremacy, the truth, and the purity of 
Jesus Christ. (Applause). 

Henceforth the life of Peter, and of Peter's successor, 
became the great leading light, around which, and towards 
which, the whole history of the world revolved. It became 
the central point, to which everything upon earth must tend, 
because, in the designs of God, the things of time are but for 
the things of eternity ; and Peter, in being the representa- 
tive and viceroy of the Son of God upon the earth — in the 
external headship and government of the Church — was the 
only man who came nearest to God, who had most of God 
in him and most of God in his power — in the distribution of 
his grace, in the attributes that belong to the Saviour — and, 
consequently, became the first and highest and greatest of 
men, and the only man that was necessary in this world. 
How many long and weary years Peter labored in his Mas- 
ter's cause, watering the way of his life with the tears of an 
abiding sorrow ! — in that, in an hour of weakness, he had 
betrayed Jesus Christ, until, at length, many years after the 
Saviour's ascension into heaven, an old man was brought 
forth from a deep dungeon in Rome. There were chains 
upon his aged limbs, and he was bowed down with care and 
with austerity to the very earth. The few white hairs upon 
his head fell upon his aged and drooping shoulders. Meekly 
his lips murmured as in prayer, while he toiled up the steep, 
rugged side of one of the seven hills of Rome, and when he 
had gained the summit, lo ! as in Jerusalem, many years 
before, there was a cross and there were three nails. They 
nailed the aged man to that cross, straining his time-worn 
limbs, until they drove the nails into his hands and feet, and 
then when they were about to lift him, a faint prayer came 
from his lips, and the crucified man said : " There was One 
in Jerusalem whose royal head was lifted towards Heaven 
upon a cross, and He was my Lord and my God, Jesus 
Christ. I am not worthy," he said, " to be made like hi,m 
even In suffering, and therefore, I pray you that you crucify 
me with my head towards the earth, from which I came." 
And so thus elevated he died, and the first Pope passed away. 
For three hundred years Pope has succeeded Pope. Peter 
had no sooner left the world than Linus took his sceptre and 
governed the Church of God. Though d^wn in the cata- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



457 



combs, yet lie governed the Church of God. EA T ery Bishop 
in the church, every power in the church recognized him and 
obeyed him as the representative of God — the living head, 
the earthly viceroy of the invisible, but real head — Jesus 
Christ. 

For three hundred years Pope after Pope died, and sealed 
his faith in the Church of God with a martyr's blood, and 
then after three hundred years of dire persecution the Church 
of God was free, and she walked the earth in all the majesty 
and purity of her beauty. In the fifth century the Roman 
Empire yet preserved the outward form of its majesty and 
power. All the nations of the earth bowed to Rome. All 
the conquered people looked to Rome as their master, and as 
the centre of the world, when, suddenly, from the forests and 
snows of the North, poured down the Huns, the Goths and Vis- 
igoths in countless thousands and hundreds of thousands. The 
barbarian hordes sallied from their fastnesses, and led by their 
savage kings, broke to pieces the whole Roman Empire, 
and shattered the whole fabric of Pagan civilization to atoms. 
They rode rough-shod over the Roman citizens and their 
rulers, burned their palaces and destroyed whole cities, leav- 
ing them a pile of smoldering ruins. Every vestige of ancient 
Pagan civilization and power, glory and art and science, went 
down and disappeared under the tramp of the horses of Attila. 
One power alone stood before these ruthless destroyers, one 
power alone opened its arms to receive them, one power ar- 
rested them in their career of blood and victory, and that 
power was the Catholic Church. (Applause.) In that day, 
says a Protestant historian, the Catholic Church saved the 
world, and out of these rude elements formed the foundation 
of the civilization, the liberty and the joy which is our por- 
tion in this the nineteenth century. (Prolonged applause.) 
In the meantime Rome was destroyed. The fairest provinces 
of Gaul, Spain, Italy and Germany were overrun by the bar- 
barians, and the people oppressed, fathers of families cut off, 
hearth-fires extinguished, and the blood of the young ravish- 
ed maiden and of the weeping mother wantonly shed. The 
people in their agony cried out to the only man whom the bar- 
barians revered and respected, whom the whole world recog- 
nized as something tinged with Divinity — the Pope of Rome 
— the cry of an anguished people went forth from end to end 
of Italy : and in that ninth century the cry was, Save us from 
ruin ! Cover us with the mantle of your protection ! Be 
thou our monarch and king ! and then, and then only, can we 
expect to be saved ! (Applause.) Then did the Pope of Rome 
20 



458 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



clothe himself with a new power, independent of that which 
he received already, and which was recognized from the begin- 
ning — namely, that temporal power and sovereignty, that 
crown of a monarch, that place at the council chambers of 
kings, that voice in the guidance of nations and in the influ- 
encing of the destinies of the material world which, for cen- 
tury after century, he exercised, but which we, in our day, 
have seen him deprived of by the hands of those who have 
plucked the kingly crown from his aged and venerable brow. 
How did he exercise that power ? How did he wear that 
crown ? "What position does he hold, as his figure rises up 
before the historical vision of the student, looking back into 
the past and beholding him as he passes among the long file 
of kings and warriors of the earth ? O, my friends, no 
sword dripping with blood is seen in the hands of the Pope 
King, but only the sceptre of justice and of law. 

No cries of suffering and afflicted people surround him, 
but only the blessing of peace and of a delighted and consoled 
world. Xo blood follows, flowing in the path of his progress. 
That path is strewn with the tears of those who wept with 
joy at his approach, and with the flowers of peace and of 
contentment. He used his power — and history bears me out 
when I say it — the power which was providentially put into 
his hands, by which he was made not only a king among 
kings, but the first recognized monarch in Christendom, and 
the king highest among kings, and the man whose voice gov- 
erned the kings of the earth, convened their councils, directed 
their course, reproved them in their errors, and refrained 
from shedding the blood of their people, and from the com- 
mission of other injustices — all these powers he used for the 
good of God's people. He used that power for a thousand 
years for the purpose of clemency, of law, of justice and of 
freedom. When Spain and Portugal, in the zenith of their 
power, each commanding mighty armies, were about to draw 
the sword and devastate the fair plains of Castile and Anda- 
lusia, the Pope came in and £<aid : " Mighty kings though you 
be, I will not permit you to shed the blood of your people in 
an unnecessary war." When Philip Augustus, of France, at 
the height of his power, and when he was the strongest king 
in Christendom, wished to repudiate his lawful wife and to 
take another in her stead, the injured woman appealed to 
Pome, and from Rome came the voice of Rome's kiDg, saying 
to him : " O, monarch, great and mighty as thou art, if thou 
doest this injustice to thy married wife and scandalize the 
world by thine impurity, I will send the curse of God and of 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



459 



His Church upon you, and cut you off like a rotten branch 
from among the community of kings." When Henry VIII. 
of England wished to put away from him the pure and high- 
minded and lawful mother of his children, because his licen- 
tious eyes had fallen upon a younger and fairer form than 
hers, the Pope of Rome said to him : " If you commit this 
iniquity, if you repudiate your lawful wife, if you set up the 
principle that because you are a king you can violate the 
law, if no power in your own country is able to bring you to 
account for it, my hand will come down upon you, and I will 
cut you off from the communion of the faithful, and fling you, 
with the curse of God upon you, out upon the world." And 
I say that in such facts as these — and I might multiply them 
by the hundred — the Pope of Rome used his temporal sov- 
ereignty and his kingly power among the nations in estab- 
lishing the sacred cause of human liberty. I speak of human 
liberty — I speak of liberty. I thank my God that I am 
breathing an air in which a free man may speak the lan- 
guage of freedom. (Applause.) 

I have a right to speak of freedom, for I am the child of a 
race that for eight hundred years have been martyred in the 
sacred cause of freedom. Never did a people love it since 
the world was created as the children of Ireland, who enjoy 
it less than all the nations. I can speak this night, but rather 
with the faltering voice of an infant than with the full swell- 
ing tones of a man, for I have loved thee, O mother Liberty ! 
Thy fair face was veiled from mine eyes from the days of my 
childhood. I longed to see the glistening of thy pure eyes, O 
liberty. I never saw it until I set my foot upon the soil of 
glorious, young Columbia. And there, rising out of this great 
Western ocean, like Aphrodite of old — like Venus from the 
foam of the rising billows, I beheld the goddess in all her 
beauty, and as a priest, as well as an Irishman, I bow down 
to thee. But what is liberty ? Does it consist in every man 
having a right to do as he likes ? Why, if it does, it would 
remind one of the liberty that a man took with a friend of 
mine in Ireland. He took the liberty to go into the man's 
house, and to sit down without being asked. And he took 
the liberty to make free with the victuals, and, at last, the 
man of the house was obliged to take the liberty of kicking 
him down stairs. No, my friends, this is not liberty. The 
quintessence of freedom lies not in the power of every man 
to do what he likes, but that quintessence of freedom and 
liberty lies in every man having his rights clearly defined. 
No matter what he is, from the first to the last, from the 



460 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



humblest to the highest in the community, let every man 
know his own rights. Let him know what power he has and 
what privileges. Give him every reasonable freedom and 
liberty, and secure that to him by law, and then when you 
have secured every man's rights and denned them by law, 
make every man in the State, from the highest to the lowest, 
from the President down to the poorest, the greatest and the 
noblest, as well as the humblest and the meanest — let every 
man be obliged to bow down before the omnipotence of the 
law. A people that knows its rights, a people that has its rights 
thus defined, a people that is lesciv&d to assert the omnipo- 
tence of those rights — that people can never be enslaved. 
Now, this being the definition of liberty — and I am sure it 
comes home like conviction to every man in this house — 
what is freedom ? That I know what rights I have, and that 
no man will be allowed to infringe them. Give me every 
reasonable right, and when I have these, secure them to me, 
and keep away from me every man that dares to impede me 
in the exercise of them ; that 1 may exercise them freely, 
and that I may be as free as a bird that flies and wings its 
way through the air. 

JSTow I ask you, Who is the father of this liberty that we 
enjoy to-day ? — who is the father of it, if not the man who 
stood between the barbarian, coming down to waste, with 
fire and sword — to abolish the law, to abolish the government 
and destroy the people — the man that stood between him and 
the people, and said: "Let us make laws, and you respect 
them, and I will get the people to respect them." That man 
was the Pope of Rome. Who was that man that, for a thou- 
sand years, as a crowned monarch, was the very impersona- 
tion of the principle of law but the Pope ? Who was the 
man that was equally ready to crush the poor man and the 
rich man, the king and the people — to crush them by the 
weight of his authority when they violated that law and re- 
fused to recognize that palladium of human liberty ? It was 
the Pope of Rome. Who was the man whose genius inspired 
and whose ability contributed to the foundation and the very 
institutions of the Italian republics and of the ancient liber- 
ties of Spain in the early middle ages? Who was the man 
that protected them from the tyranny of the cruel barons, 
immured in their castles ? He was the man whose house was 
a sanctuary for the weak and persecuted, who surrounded 
that house with all the censures and vengeance of the Church 
against any one who would violate its sanctity. Who labored, 
by degrees, patiently, for more than a thousand years, until 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



461 



he at length succeeded in elaborating the principles of modern 
freedom and modern society from out the chaotic ruin and 
confusion of these ages of barbarism ? Who was he ? — the 
father of civilization — the father of the world ? History 
asserts, and asserts loudly, that he was the royal Pope of 
Rome. And now the gratitude of the world has been to 
shake his ancient and time-honored throne, and to pluck the 
kingly crown from his brow in his old age ; after seventy 
years of usefulness and of glory, and to confine him a prison- 
er, practically, in the Vatican Palace in Pome. A prisoner, 
I say, practically, for how can he be considered other than a 
prisoner, who cannot go out of his palace into the streets of 
the city, without hearing the ribaldry, the profanity, the 
obscenity and the blasphemy, to which his aged, pure and 
virgin ears had never lent themselves for a moment of his 
life. Yes — he is unthroned, but not dishonored ; uncrowned, 
but not dishonored ; not uncrowned by the wish of his own 
people, I assert, for I have lived for twelve years amidst 
them, and I know he never oppressed them. Pie never drove 
them forth — the youth of his subjects — to be slaughtered on 
the battle-field, because he had some little enmity or jealousy 
against his fellow-monarch. He never loaded them with 
taxes nor oppressed them until life became too heavy to bear. 
Uncrowned indeed, but not dishonored, though we behold 
him seated in the desolate halls of the once-glorious Vatican, 
abandoned by all human help, and by the sympathy of nearly 
all the world! But upon those aged brows there rests a 
crown — a triple crown, that no human hand can ever pluck 
from his brow, because that crown has been set on that head 
by the hand of Jesus Christ and by his church. That triple 
crown, my friends, is the crown of spiritual supremacy, the 
crown of infallibility, and the crown of perpetuity. In the 
day when Christ said to Peter, " Confirm thou them ; feed 
my lambs and feed my sheep ; to thee do I give the keys of 
the kingdom of heaven" — in that day he made Peter supreme 
among the Apostles. His words meant this, or they meant 
nothing. Peter wielded that sceptre of supremacy, and 
nothing is more clearly pointed out in the subsequent in- 
spired history of the church, as recorded in the Acts of the 
Apostles, than the fact that when Peter spoke, every other 
man, Apostle or otherwise, was silent, and accepted Peter's 
word as the last decision, from which there was no appeal. 
Never, in the Church of God, has Peter's successor ceased to 
assert broadly, emphatically and practically this primacy. 
Never was a Council convened in the Catholic Church except 



462 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



on the commands of the Pope. Never did a Council of 
Bishops presume to sit down and deliberate upon matters of 
faith and morals except under the guidance and in the pres- 
ence of the Pope, either personally there, or theie by his 
officers or legates. Never was a letter read at the opening 
of any Council, and they were constantly sent to each suc- 
ceeding Council, but that the bishops of the church did not 
rise up and exclaim, " We hear the voice of the Pope, which 
is the Toice of Peter, and Peter's voice is the echo of the 
voice of Jesus Christ." Xever did any man in the Church 
of God presume to appeal from the tribunal of the Pope, 
even to the church in council, without having the taint of 
"heresy affixed upon him, and the curse of disobedience and 
schism put upon him. 

Kow, for centuries it has been the recognized principle 
of the Catholic Church that no man can lawfully appeal to 
.any tribunal from the decision of the Pope in matters spirit- 
ual or in matters touching faith and morality, because there 
is no tribunal to appeal to above him save that of God. He 
represents, as the visible head of the church, the invisible 
head, who is no other than Jesus Christ. The consequence 
is that the church is a kingdom, like every other state, has 
its last grand tribunal, just like the House of Lords in 
England, just like the Chief Justiceship in America, the 
High Court of Justice at Washington, from which there is 
no appeal. What follows from this ? There is no appeal 
from the Pope's decision. There never has been. Is the 
church bound to abide by that decision ? Most certainly, for 
history proves it in every age, Xever has any man risen 
against the Pope's decisions without being branded as one 
tainted with heresy and cut off from the church. Is the 
church bound to abide by his decision ? Certainly, because 
the church is bound hi obedience to her head, and one man 
alone can command the obedience of the church and the 
duty of submission, and that man has been the Pope. He 
has always commanded it, and no one has dared to appeal 
from his decision, because as I said before, he is the Viceroy, 
the Visible Head of the Church, and in whom, officially, is 
the voice of Jesus Christ present with his church. (Applause.) 

Xow what follows from this, my friends ? If it be true 
that the church of God can never believe a lie, if it be true 
that she can never be called by a voice that she is bound to 
obey to accept a lie, if it be true that nothing false in doc- 
trine or unsound in morality can ever be received by the 
■church of God, or ever be imposed upon her — for he said, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



463 



who founded her : " The gates of hell shall never ] revail 
against my church " — then it follows, that if there be no 
appeal from the Pope's decision, "but only submission on the 
part of the church, it follows that the Pope, when he speaks 
as the nead of the church, when he preaches to the whole 
church, when he bears witness to the church's belief and to 
the church's morality, when he propounds a certain doctrine 
to her — upon a body that can never believe a lie, that can 
never act upon a lie, whose destiny is to remain pure in doc- 
rine and in morality — pure as the Son of God who created 
her — it follows, that when the Pope propounds that doctrine 
to the church, he cannot propound a lie to her, or force 
that lie upon her belief. 

In other words, the Pope may make a mistake. If he 
write a book as a private author, he may put something in it 
that is not true. If he propound certain theories unconnected 
with faith and morals, he may be as mistaken as you or I, but 
the moment the Pope stands up before the Holy Church of 
God, and says, " This is the church's belief, this has been 
from the beginning her belief, this is her tradition, this is her 
truth," then he cannot, under such circumstances, teach the 
Catholic Church and spouse of Jesus Christ a lie. Conse- 
quently he is infallible. I do not give the church's infallibil- 
ity, as the intrinsic reason of Papal infallibility, hut I say 
this, that if any reasoning man admits that Christ founded an 
infallible church, it follows of necessity that he must admit 
an infallible head. It was but three or four days ago that I 
was disputing with a Unitarian minister, a man of intelligence 
and of deep learning, as clever a man, almost, as I ever met, 
and he said to me, "HI once admitted that the church was 
infallible, that she could not err, that moment I would have 
to admit the infallibility of the Pope, for how on earth can 
you imagine a church that cannot err, bound to believe a man 
that commands her to believe a lie ? It is impossible, it is 
absurd upon the face of it." And so my friends it has ever 
been the belief and faith of the Catholic Church that the Pope 
is preserved by the same spirit of truth that preserves the 
church. But you will ask me, " If this be the case, tell me 
how is it that it was only three or four years ago that the 
church declared that the Pope was infallible ? I answer, 
that the Catholic Church cannot — it is not alone that she will 
not, but she cannot teach anything new, anything unheard 
of. She cannot find truth, as it were, as a man would find a 
guinea under a stone. She cannot go looking for new ideas, 
and saying : " Ah ! I find this is new ! Did you ever hear 



464 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



of it before?" The church cannot say that. She has from 
the beginning the full deposit of Catholic truth in her hand ; 
she has it in her instinct ; she has it in her mind ; but it is 
only now and then, when a sore emergency is put upon her 
and she cannot help it, that the church of God declares this 
truth or that, or the other, which she has always believed to 
be a revelation of God, and crystallizes her faith and belief 
and tradition in the prismatic form of dogmatic definition. 

Which of us doubts that the very foundation of the 
Catholic Church rests upon the belief that Christ our Lord, 
the Redeemer, was the Son of God ? It is the very founda- 
tion stone of Christianity. This has been the essence of all 
religion since the Son of God became man, and yet, my 
friends, for three hundred years the Catholic church had not 
said a single word about the divinity of Christ, and it was 
after three hundred years when a man named Arius rose up 
and said : " It is all a mistake ; the son of Mary is not the 
Son of God. He who suffered and died on the cross was 
not the Son of God, but a mere man." Then after three 
hundred years the church turned round and said : " If any 
man says that Jesus Christ is not God let that man be 
accursed as an infidel and a heretic." Would any of you 
say, " Then it seems that for three hundred years the church 
did not believe it." No, she always believed it ; it was 
always a foundation stone. " If she did believe it, why didn't 
she define it ? I answer, the occasion had not arisen. It is 
only when some bold invader, when some proud, heretical 
man, when some bad spirit manifests itself among the people, 
that the church is obliged to come out and say : " Take 
care ! take care ! Remember this is her faith," and then when 
she declares her faith it becomes a dogmatic definition, and 
all Catholics are bound to bow to it. Need I tell you, Irish 
maids, Irish mothers, and Irish men — need I tell you how 
Patrick preached of the woman whom he called Murie 3fath- 
aire, " Mary Mother," the woman whom he called the Virgin 
of God ? Need I tell you that the church always beli'eved 
that that woman was the Mother of God ? And yet you will 
be surprised to hear that at the time that Patrick preached 
to the Irish people the church had not defined it as an arucle 
of faith. It was only in the fifth century that the church at 
Ephesus declared dogmatically that Mary was the Mother of 
God. Didn't she believe it before ? Certainly. It was no 
new thing ; she always believed it, but there was no neces- 
sity to assert it till heretics denied it. Then, to guard her 
children from the error which was being asserted she had to 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



define her faith. Did not the church always believe the 
presence of Christ transubstantiated in the Eucharist ? Most 
certainly. All history tells us that she believed it. Her 
usages, her ceremonies, every thing in her points to that 
divine presence as their life and centre, but it was sixteen 
hundred years before the church defined it as an article of 
faith, then only because Calvin denied it. It was denied by 
Berengarius, a learned man in the thirteenth century, but he 
immediately repented, and burned his book, and there was an 
eud to it ; but the first man to preach a denial of the real 
presence of Christ was Calvin. Luther never did. We must 
give the devil his due. (Laughter.) The church of God 
declared that Christ was present, and that the substance of 
bread and wine was changed into the body and blood of the 
Lord. And so in our day the church for the first time found 
it necessary to declare that her head, her visible head, can 
not teach her a lie. It seems such an outrage upon common 
sense to deny this, it seems so palpable and plain, from the 
very constitution of the Church, that it seems as if the defi- 
nition of this dogma were unnecessary. Yet in truth it was 
to meet the proud, self-asserting, caviling, questioning spirit 
of our day that the church was obliged to do this. It was 
because, guided by a wise Providence, scarcely knowing, yet 
foreseeing that which was to come that the Pope was to be 
deprived of all the prestige of his temporal power ; that all 
that surrounded him in Rome was to be lost to him for a 
time ; that perhaps it was his destiny to be driven out and 
exiled and a stranger among other men on the face of the 
earth, so that he might be unknown, lost sight of, that the 
church of God, with her eight hundred Bishops, rising up in 
the strength of her guiding spirit, fixed upon the brow of her 
pontiff the seal of her faith in his infallibility, that wherever 
he goes, wherever he is found, whatever misfortunes may be 
his lot, he will still have that seal upon him which no other 
man can bear, and which is the stamp of the head of the 
Catholic Church [Applause]. 

And now, my friends, we come to the last circle of that 
spiritual tiara that rests upon the brow of Pius the Ninth. 
It is the crown of perpetuity. There is no man necessary in 
this world but one. We are here to-day, we die to-morrow, 
and others take our places. The kings of the earth are not 
necessary. Sometimes, Lord knows, it would be as well if 
they did not exist at all. (Laughter). The statesmen and 
philosophers of the earth are not necessary. My friends, the 
politicians of to-day are scarcely a necessity. We might 
20* 



466 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION; 



manage by a little engineering, and above all by a little more 
honesty — to get on without them, and find perhaps a few dol- 
lars in our pockets. One man alone was necessary to this 
world from the beginning, and that one man was the man 
whom we behold on the cross on Good Friday morning — he 
alone. Without him we were all lost : no grace, but sin ; no 
purity, but corruption ; no heaven, but hell. He was necessary 
for the beginning, and the only man that is now necessary 
upon the earth is the man that represents Him. We cannot 
get on without him. The Church must have her head, and 
He who declared that the Church was to last unto the end of 
time will take good care to keep her head. He is under tte 
hand of God, and under the hand of the Ruler of the Church 
we may well afford to leave him. He will take good care of 
him. As a temporal ruler I assert still that the Pope is the 
only necessary ruler on the face of the earth. He is necessary 
because, not establishing his power by the sword, not preserv- 
ing it by the sword, not enlarging his dominions by the sword, 
by injustice as a monarch ; as a king he represents the principle 
of right unprotected by might, and of justice and law, enthron- 
ed by the common consent of all nations. In the day when 
might shall assume the place of right ; in the day when a man 
cannot find two square feet of earth on which to build a throne, 
without bloodshed and injustice; in that day, when it comes, the 
Pope will no longer be necessary as a temporal sovereign ; but 
pray God, that before that day comes you and I be in our graves ! 
for when that day comes, if it ever comes, life will be no blessing, 
and existence upon this earth will be a curse rather than a joy. 
The Pope is necessary, because some power is needed to stand 
between the Kings and their people ; some power before which 
Kings must bow down ; some voice recognized by them as 
the voice not of the subject, not of an ordinary man or an 
ordinary Bishop, a voice as of a King among kings ; some 
voice which will confound the jealousies, and passions, and 
scandals of the rulers of the earth, which only serve as so many 
means to shed the blood of the people. (Applause.) 

Our best security is the crown that rests upon the brew 
of a peaceful king. Our best security is the crown that rests 
upon the brow of a man who was always and ever ready to 
shield the weak from the powerful, and to save to woman her 
honor, her dignity, her place in the family, her maternity, 
from the treachery and the villainy and the inconstancy of 
man, to strip off the chains of the slave, and to prepare him 
before emancipation for the glorious gift of freedom. This 
power is the Pope's, and he has exercised it honestly and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



467 



well. Protestant historians will tell that the Pope was the 
father of liberty, that he was the founder of modern civiliza- 
tion, and that the crown that was upon his head was the 
homage paid by the nations to his clemency and mercy, and 
justice and law (applause). And therefore he must com6 
back ; he must come and seat himself upon the throne again. 
The day will come when all the Catholics in the world will 
be desirous of this, and when that day comes, and not till 
then, justice shall be once more tempered by mercy ; absolu- 
tism shall be once more neutralized by the constitutional 
liberties and privileges of the people. When that day comes, 
the people on their side will feel the strong yet quiet restrain- 
ing hand enforcing the law, while the kings, on their side, 
will behold once more the hated and detested vision of the 
hand of the Pontiff brandishing the thunders of the Vatican. 
(Arjplause). 

That day must come, and with it will come the dawn of a 
better day, and of peace. And I believe it, even now, in this 
future day, in this coming year, advancing at the head of all 
the rulers of the earth, and pointing out with sceptred hand 
the way of justice, of mercy, of truth and of freedom we 
shall behold him, when all the nations of the earth shall greet 
his return to power, shall greet his entry into the council 
chambers of their sovereigns, even as the Jews greeted the 
entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, and hailed him king. 
I behold him, when foremost among the nations that shall 
greet him in that hour, a sceptred monarch and crowned 
king, a ruler temporal, and, far more, a spiritual father ; and 
among these nations the mighty, the young, the glorious and 
the free America will present herself at the head of them. 
When this land, so mighty in its extent and the limits of its 
power that it cannot afford to be anything else than Catholic 
— for no other faith can be commensurate with so mighty a 
nation — when that land, this glorious America, developing 
her resources, rising into that awful majesty of power, will 
shake the world and shape its destinies, will find every other 
religious garb too small and too miserable to cover her stately 
form, save the garb of the Catholic faith and the Christian 
garment in which the church of God will envelope her. And 
she, strong in her material power, strong in her mighty in- 
telligence/ strong in that might that will place her at the 
front of the nations, shall be the first to hail her Pontiff, her 
father and her king, and to establish him upon his mighty 
throne as the emblem and the centre of the faith and the 
glorious religion of a united people, whose strength — the 



46S 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



strength of intellect, the strength of faith, the strength of 
material power — will raise up before the eyes of a wondering 
and united world — a new vision of the recuperated power and 
majesty and greatness of the Almighty God, as reflected in 
his work. (Loud and prolonged applause). 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



[A Lecture delivered "by the Rev. Father Burke, in the Academy 
of Music, New York May 22.] 



" THE EXILES OF ERIN." 



Ladies and Gentlemen : One of the strongest passions 
and the noblest that God has implanted in the heart of man 
is a love of the land that bore him. The poet says, and 
well — 

"Lives there a man, with a soul so dead, 
Who never to himself has said : 
' This is my own, my native land ?' " 

The pleasure of standing upon the soil of our birth ; the pleas- 
ure of preserving every association that surrounded our boy. 
hood and our youth; the pleasure, sad and melancholy though 
it be, of watching every gray hair and wrinkle that time 
sends, even to those whom we love — these are among the 
keenest and the best pleasures of which the heart of man is 
capable. Therefore it is, at all times, that to be exiled from 
his native land has been looked upon by man as a penalty 
and a grievance. This is true even of men whom nature has 
placed upon the most rugged and barren soil. The Swiss 
peasant, who lives amid the everlasting snows of the upper 
Alps, who sees no form of beauty in nature except her grand- 
est, most austere and rugged proportions, so dearly loves his 
arid mountain home that it is a heart-break to him to be torn 
from it, even were he to spend his exile in the choicest and 
most delicious gardens of the earth. Much more does the 
pain of exile rest upon the children of a race at once the most 
generous, the most kind-hearted and the most loving in the 
world. 

Much more does it rest upon the children of a race who 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



469 



look back to their mother-land as to a fair and beautiful land, 
with climate temperate and delicious; soil fruitful and abun- 
dant ; scenery, now rising into the glory of magnificence,, 
now softening into the tenderest pastoral beauty ; history the 
grandest among all the nations of the earth ; associations the 
tenderest, because the most Christian and the purest — all 
these, and more, aggravate the misery and enhance the pain 
which the Irishman, of all other men, must feel when he is 
exiled from his native land. And yet, my friends, among the 
destinies of the nations, the destiny of the Irish race from the 
earliest time has been that of voluntary or involuntary exile. 
Two great features distinguish the history of our race and of 
our people. The first of these is that we are of a warrior and 
a warlike race, quick, impulsive, generous, fraternal and al- 
ways ready to fight, and often to fight for the sake of the 
fight. Indeed, the student of history must see that wherever 
the Celtic blood is there is a taste for military organization 
and for war. Whilst the Teuton and the Saxon are content 
with their prosperity, and very often attain to their ends and 
their aims more directly and more successfully by negotia- 
tion, the Celt, wherever he is, is always ready to resent an in- 
iury and very often to create one for the sake of resenting it, 
even where it is not intended at all. And, strangely, is not 
this great fact brought out in the relations of the great Celtic 
nations of France, which is of the same race, the same stock 
and the same blood as Ireland — to whom, in weal and woe, 
the heart of Ireland has always throbbed sympathetically — 
exulting in the joys of France, and lamenting and weeping 
over her sorrows. Hundreds of years of history lie before us, 
and this French-Celtic race has always been engaged, in every 
age and in every time, in war with their more prudent and 
more cold-blooded neighbors around them. Now, if you look 
through history, you will almost invariably find that France, 
the Celt, was always the first to fling down the glove, to 
draw the sword, and to cry out, " War." Even in the last 
ill-fated war, things were so arranged and managed, that 
while Bismarck was smiling, shrugging his shoulders, and 
invariably washing his hands in imperceptible water, the 
French, the moment they saw the opening for war, the mo- 
ment they thought that war was possible, that moment, un- 
prepared as they were, not stopping to calculate or to reflect, 
they rushed to the front and were trodden into the earth. 
But that glorious flag of France has gone down without dis- 
honor, and will not, as long as it is upheld by the heroic 
courage of her Celtic children. And it was with our French 



470 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



cousins, so — for good or bad luck, as you will — has it been 
for ourselves. From the day that the Dane landed in Ireland, 
at the close of the eighth century, down to this blessed day, 
at the close of the nineteenth century, for the last eleven 
hundred years, Ireland has been fighting. War, war — inces- 
sant war ; war with the Dane for three hundred years ; war 
with the Saxon for eight hundred years ; and, unfortunately 
for Ireland, when she had not the Dane or the Saxon to 
fight with, her children picked quarrels and fought among 
themselves. 

Now, the second great feature of our destiny seems to 
have been, as traced in our history, that it was the will of 
God and our fate that a large portion of our people should 
be constantly either driven from the Irish shore or obliged by 
force of circumstances to leave it apparently of their own 
free will. The Irish exile is not a being of yesterday or of 
last year. We turn over these time-honored pages of his- 
tory, we come to the very brightest pages of our own national 
record, and still we find emblazoned upon the annals of every 
nation of the earth, the grandest and the most honored name 
of the exiles of Erin. (Loud applause.) It is, therefore, 
to this theme I invite your attention this evening. And why ? 
Because, my friends, I hold, as an Irishman, that next to the 
gospel that I preach and to the religion that I love comes the 
gospel and the religion of my love for Ireland and of my 
glory in her. (Loud applause.) Every page in her history 
that is a record of glory brings joy to your hearts and to 
mine. Every argument that builds up the temple of Irish 
fame upon the foundations of religion, virtue and valor is an 
argument to introduce into your hearts and mine a strong, 
stormy feeling of pride for our native land. (Applause.) 
Why should we not be proud of her? Has she ever in that 
long record of history wronged or oppressed any people? 
Never. Has she ever attempted to plunder from any people 
their sacred birthright of liberty? Never. Has she ever 
refused, upon the invitation of the Church and of her own 
conscience, to loosen the chains and strike them off the limbs 
of the slave ? Never. Has she ever drawn the sword, which 
she has wielded for centuries, in an unjust or even a doubtfuj 
cause ? Never. Blood has stained the sword of Ireland. 
For ages that blood has dripped from the national sword, but 
never did Ireland's sword shed a drop of blood unjustly, but 
only in defence of the highest, holiest and the best of causes 
—the altar of God and the altar of the nation. (Loud ap- 
plause.) 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



471 



And now, my friends, coming to consider the Exiles of 
Erin, I find three great epochs are marked in the history of 
Ireland,with the sign of the exodus or exile of her children 
upon them. The first of these go back for nearly fourteen 
hundred years. In the year 432, Patrick, coming from Rome, 
preached the Catholic faith to Ireland, and the Irish mind 
and the Irish heart sprang to that faith, took it, embraced it, 
put it into the lives of her children, and became Catholic 
under the very hand and eye of her apostle as no nation on 
the earth ever did, or ever will, unto the end of time. At 
once the land became a land, not only of Christians, but of 
saints. Wise and holy kings ruled and governed her. Wise 
and saintly councilors guided her. Every law was obeyed 
so perfectly and so implicity that in the records of our na- 
tional annals it is told that under the golden reign of the 
great King Brian a young and unprotected female could 
walk from one end of the land to the other laden with gold 
and treasure, and no man would insult her virtue, bring a 
blush to her virgin cheek, nor attempt to rob her of the rich 
and valuable jewels which she wore upon her. (Applause.) 
Then the Irish heart, enlarged and expanded by the new ele- 
ment of Christian charity which was infused into it with this 
religion, and the Irish mind, before so cultivated in all pagan 
literature, now enlightened with the higher and more glorious 
rays of faith, looked out with pity upon the nations that 
were around, sitting in darkness, in barbarism and in the 
shade of death. From the Irish monasteries in the sixth and 
seventh centuries began the first great exodus or exile from 
Ireland. I call it the exodus, or the going forth of faith. 
Revelling in all the beauty of her Christianity, enjoying the 
blessings of peace, the light of divine truth and the warmth 
of holy charity, and endowed with learning, she became the 
great school-house and university of the world. All the na- 
tions around her sent their youth to Ireland to be instructed, 
and then these Irish saintly masters of all human and divine 
knowledge found, by the account given them by these youth- 
ful scholars, that there was neither religion nor faith nor 
learning in the countries around. England, yet in possession 
of the Anglo-Saxons, was still in paganism. 

The ancient Britons, now called the Welsh, had their Chris- 
tianity, but they kept it to themselves, and in their hatred of 
their Saxon invaders, these British bishops, priests and monks 
took the most cruel form of revenge that ever nation exercised 
against nation. They actually refused to preach the Gospel 
to the Saxons for fear they might be saved and get into 



472 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



lieaven with themselves. (Laughter.) Ireland, evangelized, 
enlightened and warmed with the rays of divine charity, cast 
a pitying look upon the neighboring country, and in the sixth 
and seventh centuries numbers of Irish monks went forth — 
travelled into Scotland, travelled through the land of Eng- 
land, and everywhere preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
(Applause.) Spreading from the north of England and from 
the remote north of Scotland, we find them in every land of 
Europe. We find, for instance, the valleys of Switzerland 
evangelized by an Irish saint — St. Gall — whose name still 
marks a town of that country, and whose name is still held 
in veneration even by those who scarcely know the land of 
his birth. We find another Irish saint of that time — Frido- 
line, or Fridolinus — who went through the length and breadth 
of Europe, until, at length, he was known of all men for the 
greatness of his learning, for the power of his preaching, for 
the wonderful sanctity of his life, and he was called "Frido- 
line, the Traveller," for he went about from nation to nation, 
evangelizing the people in the name of Jesus Christ. We 
find St. Columba going forth in the seventh century, pene- 
trating into the heart of France, preaching the Gospel and 
converting the people of Burgundy; then, passing across the 
Alps, he descended into the plains of Lombardy, and in the 
very land where St. Ambrose and so many other great lights 
of the Church had shone, Columba preached the Gospel, and 
appeared as a new vision of sanctity and of holiness before 
the ancient Italian people, who were converted by the sound 
of his voice. At the same time St. Kilian penetrated into 
Germany and evangelized Franconia. But the greatest of 
all these saints, these Irish exiles of that seventh century, 
was the man whose name is familiar to you all, whose name 
is enshrined among the very highest saints in the Church's 
calendar, and whose history has furnished a theme to Count 
Montalembert, the greatest writer of our age, who found in 
the name of the Irish saint, Columba, or Columbkille, the 
theme for the very highest and grandest piece of history that 
our age has produced. 

The history of this saint, striking for its extraordinary 
sanctity, yet brings out fully and forcibly the strength as 
well as the weakness of the Irish character. St. Columbkille 
was a descendant of the great Niall of the Nine Hostages, 
who founded in Ulster the royal house of O'Neil. He was a 
near relative of the King of Ulster, and he consecrated him- 
self to God in his youth and became a monk. Speedily he 
rose in the fame of his learning and his sanctity. He studied 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



473 



in Armagh ; he studied in Luitnneach, the present Limerick, 
upon the Shannon. From there he went to an island outside 
of Galway Bay, and there, as he himself tells us, he spent 
the happiest days of his life, engaged in prayer and in study. 
Well, as you are aware, at this early period there were no 
boohs, because there was no art of printing. Every book had 
to be written out patiently in manuscript, and bocks were of 
such value that a copy of the Scriptures would purchase an 
estate — and a large estate. At this time a celebrated Irish 
saint, named St. Finnian, had a rare and precious copy of the 
Psalms written out in goodly characters upon leaves of parch- 
ment. St. Columba wanted a copy of this work for himself. 
He went to St. Finnian and asked it. He was refused. The 
book was too precious to be copied. He asked, at least, to be 
allowed to read it, and he came into the church where the 
book was deposited, and there he spent night after night wri- 
ting out a clean copy of the book. By the time that St. Co- 
lumba had finished his copy, somebody who had watched him 
at his work, went and told St. Finnian that the young man 
had made a copy of his Psalter. The moment St. Finnian 
heard it he laid claim to the copy as belonging to him. St. 
Columba refused to give it up. They appealed to the King 
in Tara, and King Dermot, then the King in Ireland, called 
his councillors together, and they passed a decree that St. 
Columba should give up the copy, because the original be- 
longed to St. Finnian, the copy was only a copy from the 
original, and should go with it ; and the Irish decree began 
with : " Every cow has a right to her own calf." (Laughter.) 

Xow, mark the action of St. Columbkille. As a saint he 
was a man devoted to prayer and fasting all the days of his 
life, and a man gifted with miraculous powers, and yet under 
all that as thorough an Irishman as ever lived. The moment 
he heard that the King had resolved that he should give back 
his precious book, he reproached him and said: "I am a 
cousin of yours, and there you went against me." He put 
the clanship — the sha?iagiis upon him. The King said he 
couldn't help it, and what does St. Columba do ? He takes 
the book under his arm and away he went up into Ulster, to 
raise a clan of the O'Xeils. He was, himself, the son of their 
king. They were a powerful clan in the country, and the 
moment they heard their kinsman's cry they arose like one 
man ; for whoever asked a lot of Irishmen to get up a row and 
was disappointed ? 

They rose. They followed their glorious heroic monk 
down into Westmeath. There they met the King and his 



474 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



army, and I regret to say, a "battle was the consequence, in 
which hundreds of men were slain, and the fair plains of the 
country were deluged with blood. It was only then that Co- 
lumba perceived the terrible mistake he had made. Like an 
Irishman he first had the fight out of them, and then he began 
to reflect on it afterward. In penance for that great crime, 
his confessor, a holy monk named Medler, condemned him to 
go out of Ireland, to exile himself, and never again to return 
to the land of his birth and of his love. Nothing is more 
beautiful and more tender than the letter that St. Columb- 
kille wrote to his kinsmen in Ulster. " My fate is sealed," he 
said ; " my doom is sealed. A man told me I must exile my- 
self forever from Ireland, and that man I recognize as an 
angel of God, and I must go." With breaking heart and 
weeping eyes he bade a last farewell to the green island of 
saints, and he went off to an island among the Hebrides, on 
the northern coast of Scotland. There, in the midst of the 
icy storms of that inclement region — there, upon a bare rock 
out from the mainland, he built a monastery, and there did 
he found the far-famed school of lona. The school, formed 
under the eyes and the influence of Columba, became the 
great mother and fountain head of that great monasticism 
which was destined to evangelize so many nations, and to 
Christianize all Scotland and the northern parts of England. 
I shall return to St. Columbkille again in the course of the 
lecture, when I come to gather the three different periods of 
exile into one bond of love for the land of our birth. 

The next century beheld an Irish monk, named St. Cathal- 
dus, penetrating through the length and breadth of Italy, 
preaching the gospel everywhere, until, at length, the Pope 
of Rome made him Bishop of Tarento, in the south of Italy. 
Another Irish monk went forth in the eighth century and 
evangelized Brabant, in the low countries. Two Irish monks, 
Clement and Albinus, were celebrated through all the schools 
of Europe in the eighth century, and they went By the name 
of the " seekers after wisdom," or the " philosophers." In a 
word, the Irish monks of the seventh, eighth and ninth cen- 
turies were the greatest evangelists, the greatest apostles, and 
the most learned men that the world ever possessed, and they 
gave to their island at home the strange title among nations, 
of the " Island of Saints ;" and the sanctity that made Ireland 
the pride and the glory of Christendom, was proved abroad 
by their apostolic labors, until they brought the message that 
sanctified Ireland home to every people in the heathen na- 
tions of the world. (Applause.) 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



475 



And so we find that, as early as Elizabeth's time and that 
of Henry VIII., Irishmen began to emigrate as soldier?. The 
armies of France, Spain and Italy were glad to receive them, 
for well they knew that wherever the Irish soldier stood in 
the post of danger, that post was secure until the enemy 
walked over his corpse. (Loud applause.) Among many 
other risings, Ireland arose almost as a nation in the year 
1641. The Confederation of Kilkenny was formed. The 
Catholics of Ireland, unwilling to bear the yoke, and unable 
to bear the cruel, heartless, bloody persecution of Elizabeth 
and her successors, banded together as one man. All the 
ancient nobility of Ireland, the O'Neills, the O'Donnells, in 
the north, the McCartys of the south, the Clanricardes and 
Burkes in Connaught — (applause) — in a word, all the Irish 
chieftains and nobility came together and formed what was 
called the National Confederacy for national defence, starting 
from Kilkenny. For eleven years this war was continued. 
An Irishman who had attained to the highest rank in the 
armies of Spain, who was the most distinguished and the 
greatest soldier of his age, came over, left his grand position 
in Spain at the head of the Spanish army, then the finest and 
bravest in Europe, and landed upon the shores of Ireland, I 
need hardly tell you his name. It was the immortal Owen 
Roe O'Neill. (Loud applause.) He rallied the Irish forces. 
He met on many a well-fought field the armies of England, 
and thanks be to G-od ! though they poisoned him when they 
could not strike him with the sword, there is one Irishman 
upon whose grave it can be written : " Here lies a man that 
never drew the sword for Ireland or stood upon the battle- 
field without scattering his enemies like chaff before the wind 3 
of heaven." (Loud applause.) He met at Benburb, on the 
banks of the Blackwater, the English General Monroe, with a 
large and well-disciplined army, and nearly destroyed that 
army, as the great Hugh O'Neil had done at the Yellow Ford. 
O'Neill formed his men into one solid column, surrounded them 
with his artillery, gave the word to advance, and straight to 
the very heart of the English army pierced this indomitable 
column of Irish. Attacked on every side and from every 
quarter, still on they went, until they gained the brow of 
Benburb hill, nor was all the chivalry nor all the power of 
England able to stop them ; and when they gained the brow 
of the hill O'Neill was able to look around over the whole 
country, and he saw nothing but the enemy flying on every 
side as from an Angel of God. (Applause.) At another 
battle at the Carlingford Pass, he met one named Samuel 



476 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Bagenal at the head of a large English army. Tie not only 
routed, but he exterminated them. He scarcely left men 
enough to go home to their fastnesses and strongholds around 
Dublin to tell, with blanched lips, the story of their defeat. 
Cromwell landed in Ireland. O'Neill, at the bead of Ms army 
advanced from the north to measure swords with the Round- 
head from England. Ah ! well they knew the metal the 
man was made of. They sent a traitor into his camp, who 
put poison into the Irishman's wine, and in the death of 
O'Neill the great confederacy of Ireland was broken. 

And so, with divided councils, scarcely knowing whom to 
obey, one thing followed another until, on the 12th of May, 
1652, eleven years after the confederation was established, Gal- 
way, the last of the strongholds of the Irish, had to yield. 
The cause was lost, and the nobility of Ireland and the rank 
and file of the Irish army, rather than remain at home, serfs 
and slaves under the iron heel of Cromwell, went to France, 
to Spain, and to Austria, and left their mark upon the history 
of every country in Europe, as that history is proud to record. 
(Applause.) — On the 27th of October, 1851, Limerick fell. 
Forty years later and Ireland is in arms again. This time 
an English king is at her head, King James II. I wish to 
God he had been a braver man, and he would not have 
deserved the name of Shamus a hocha. (Laughter.) He was 
too fond of taking out his handkerchief and putting it to his 
eyes and crying out to the Irish soldiers, " Don't be too hard 
on them; O, spare my English subjects!" — (Laughter.) 
When the Irish Dragoons were sweeping down on the Eng- 
lish marshalled on the slopes of the Boyne they would have 
driven them and the Brunswickers into the river, and th is 
have changed the history of Ireland and taken from the fair 
and beautiful Boyne the name of reproach that it bears to-day, 
had not King James given orders and cried out "Stop them, 
don't let them make so desperate a charge." (Laughter.) 
Any man that knows the history of his country knows that, 
although the Irish lost the field at Boyne and Athlone, they 
did not lose their honor, but they crowned a lost cause with 
immortal glory. (Applause.) At length the campaign drew 
to a close. The year 1691 came — forty years after the former 
siege of Limerick, and the heroic city is once more surrounded 
with a powerful English army, while within its walls were 
ten thousand Irishmen, with Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, 
at their head. (Applause.) A breach was made in the walls. 
Three times the whole strength of the English army was 
hurled against the defenceless walls of Limerick. Three times 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



477 



within that breach arose the wild shout of the Irish soldiers, 
and three times the head of the column of Orange William 
was swept away from the breaches of Limerick. (Applause.) 
In the third of these assaults appeared combatants who are 
not generally seen either on the battle-field or on the hustings 
in Ireland. The Irish women are not what you would call 
women's rights. (Laughter and applause.) The women of 
Ireland do not go in much for women's associations, and they 
do not go in at all for free love; but they went in for the 
English in the last assault. (Laughter and applause.) The 
brave dark-eyed daughters of Southern Ireland, the mothers 
and virgins of Limerick, appeared. Shoulder to shoulder 
with their brothers and their fathers in the breach they stood, 
and while the men defended Ireland's nationality in that ter- 
rible hour, the women of Ireland raised a strong hand in de- 
fence of Ireland's purity and of Ireland's womanhood. (Loud 
applause.) And well they might. Never had her woman- 
hood a more sacred, pure, honest and noble cause to defend 
than when the women of Limerick opposed the base and 
bloody-minded invaders of their country. 

Limerick yielded. King William and his generals found 
that they could not take the city. So they made terms with 
Sarsfield that the Irish army were to go out, drums beating, 
colors flying, and arms in their hands, and that they were 
free to stay in Ireland if they wished, or to go and join the 
service of any foreign power that pleased them. The treaty 
of Limerick guaranteed to the Catholics of Ireland as much 
religious liberty as they enjoyed under the Stuarts. That 
treaty was won by the bravery of Ireland's soldiers upon the 
shattered walls of Limerick. The treaty of Limerick guaran- 
teed to Ireland's merchants the same privileges and the same 
commercial rights that the English merchants had, and that 
was wrung from the invader by the bravery of Ireland's 
soldiers on the shattered walls of Limerick ; but as soon as 
Sarsfield and his ten thousand combatants were gone, before 
the ink was dry upon the treaty it was broken. The Lords 
Justices that signed it returned to Dublin. A man, with the 
nice name of Mr. Popping, the Protestant Bishop of Meath, 
called the people together in St. Patrick's Cathedral, preached 
a sermon to them, and the subject of the sermon was "On 
the sin of keeping their oaths and keeping their words with 
the Catholics." That treaty was broken before the ink was 
dry. An era of oppression and misery followed ; and in the 
mean time Sarsfield and his brave companions took them- 
selves to France. Here is the exodus of hope. They went 



473 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



with the hope that they would one day return, and, with theii 
brave French allies, sweep the Saxon from off the sacred soil 
of Erin. (Applause). By the time Sarsfield arrived, in 1691, 
in France, there were 30,000 Irishmen in the service of King 
Louis. There were, at the same time, some 10,000 Irishmen 
in the service of Spain, and a great number in the service of 
Austria ; for it is worthy of your knowing that the Irish ol 
Leinster and of Meath went and joined the Austrian* service 
under their leaders, Nugent and Cavanagh — names that are 
still perpetuated in the Austrian army. The men of the 
north, under the O'Reillys and the O'Donnells, went to Spain, 
and at that very time Austria and Spain were fighting against 
France, and while there were 30,000 Irishmen in the Austrian 
army, there were nearly 20,000 in the other armies. Thus 
the bone and the sinew, the blood and the heart of Ireland 
were engaged in the old, unhappy work of slaughtering each 
other. Oh, how sad to think that the bravest soldiers in the 
world— the bravest soldiers that ever stood to guard a for- 
lorn hope, or with their wild hurrahs swept the battle-field — 
should be thus employed; fighting for monarchs that they 
cared nothing about, and for causes of which they knew 
nothing — meeting each other in battle, and the hands that 
should have been joined upon some glorious field in Ireland, 
for Ireland's purposes, were actually imbrued in each other's 
blood on many a battle-field in Europe ! Sarsfield, shortly 
after his arrival with his Connaught and his Leinster people- 
took service with King Louis, of France. He first crossed 
swords with the English at the siege of a town in Flanders. 
There he behaved so gallantly with his Irishmen, so thor- 
oughly cleared the field, and so completely swept away the 
English forces that were opposed to him, bearing down upon 
them when they first wavered with the awful clash of Lord 
Clare's dragoons, that the Marshal commanding the French 
forces rode up on the very field, and made Patrick Sarsfield 
a Marshal of France. 

Two years later, and we find him again at the battle of 
Landon. He is at the head of the Irish Brigade, then nun> 
bering some 30,000 men. King William — Orange William — 
is opposed to him — the man whom he had met upon many a 
field in Ireland. The close of a hard-fought day approaches. 
The English and their Dutch auxiliaries are in full flight, and 
Sarsfield, sword in hand at the head of his troops, dashed in 
among them, when suddenly a musket ball strikes his heroic 
heart, and he falls upon the field of Landon ! When the film 
of death was coming over his eyes, he put his hand, instinct- 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



479 



ively, to the wound, and withdrawing it, saw it dripping 
with his heart's blood. "O God ! "he cried, " that this blood 
were shed for Ireland ! " (Applause). The fortunes of 
France were in the ascendant from the year 1691 until about 
the year 1696. Then the famous Duke of Marlborough arose. 
The armies of Austria and the armies of France began to 
suffer reverses. The star of France began to go down. 
Marlborough conquered on many a glorious field, and his 
English soldiers certainly drove the French before them. He 
did so at Malplaquet, at Oudenarde and at Ramillies ; but it 
is a singular thing that history records — that in every one of 
these battles in which the French were defeated, the English, 
m their turn, even in the full tide of victory, had to flee 
before the Irish Brigade. (Applause). And the poet says : 

:t When on Bstfmillies' bloody field, 
The baffled French were forced to yield, 
The victor Saxon backward reeled 
Before the charge of Clare's dragoons." 

(Applause). The French army on that day was routed, but 
there was one corps, one division of the French army that 
retired off the field victorious with English standards in their 
hands, and that one was the Irish Brigade. (Applause). Year 
followed year. The strength of the corps was kept up, and 
m was the hope that they would one day return to Ireland 
and strike a blow for the dear old land. Sarsfield was in his 
grave more than forty years. France was still playing a 
losing game in the war of the Spanish succession, when the 
great Marshal Saxe arose, and in the year 1745, he, with King 
Louis XIV., in person, took the command of the army, and 
laid siege to the city of Tourney, in Flanders. He had 
75,000 men under his command. While he was still besieg- 
ing the city, the Duke of Cumberland appeared, the son of 
George the Second, and one of the most awful wretches that 
ever cursed the face of the earth with his presence. He was a 
man whose heart knew no pity ; whose heart knew no love, 
a man whose passions knew no restraint, a brute whose name 
to this day is spoken by every loyal Englishman in a whisper, 
as though he were ashamed of it. 

He commanded 55,000 men, mostly English, with some 
Dutch auxiliaries, and he marched at the head of this tre- 
mendous army to raise the siege of Tourney. When the 
French King and his Marshal heard of the approach of the 
allies, they withdrew 40,000 men from the siege, leaving 
18,000 to carry it on. With 45,000, including the Irish 
Brigade, he marched to meet the Duke of Cumberland, and 



480 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



met him on the slopes of Fontenoy. (Applause). The 
French general took his position near the village of Fontenoy. 
It was on the green slope of the hill which extended on either 
side, and he stretched his lines to a village on one side called 
St. Antoine, and on the other side to a wood called DuBar- 
ry's wood. There, entrenched and strongly established, he 
awaited his English foe. The Duke of Cumberland arrived 
at the head of his Englishmen, and for a whole day long he 
assailed the French position in vain. He sent his Dutchmen 
to attack St. Antoine. Twice they attacked the village, and 
twice were they driven back with great slaughter. Three 
times the Englishmen themselves attacked the village of 
Fontenoy and three times they were driven back by the 
French. They tried to penetrate into Du Barry's wood on the 
left hand side, but the French artillery were within, and 
again and again they were driven back, until, when the even- 
ing came, the Duke of Cumberland saw that the day was 
going against him. He assembled all the veteran tried sol- 
diers of his army. He formed a massive column of 6,000 
men, with six pieces of cannon in front of them, and six on 
either side of them. They were commanded by Lord. John 
Hay, and he adopted the same tactics that O'Neill had 
adopted at Benburb. These 6,000 men in solid column were 
given orders to march right through the village of Fontenoy 
— right through the centre of the French forces — until they 
got in their rear, then to turn round and sweep their enemies 
off the field. The word was given to march, and this I will 
say, Irishman as I am to the heart's core, that I find nowhere 
in the annals of history — and I have read as much history as 
any man — anything more glorious or more heroic than the 
behavior of the 6,000 Englishmen at Fontenoy. (Applause). 
The French closed around them. They poured in their fire. 
With their artillery they met the head of the column, but the 
column marched on like a wall of iron. These Englishmen 
marched right through the French lines. Nothing could 
stop them. Their men fell on every side, but as soon as one 
fell another stepped into his place. Solid as a wall of iron 
they penetrated the French line. In vain did the French tir- 
ralleurs fall upon them ; they were scattered by the flanking 
fire. In vain did the French reform their line. The English 
penetrated like a wedge. In vain did the King's household 
cavalry charge upon them ; they were scattered by the Eng- 
lish fire. At length King Louis, who had been taught in the 
iciiool of misfortune, turned his rein to fly. Marshal Saxe 
stopped him : " Not yet," he said. " Come up, Lord Clare 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



481 



with your Irish, and clear the way." Then in went the Irish 
Brigade, and with a wild cheer they swept everything before 
them. (Loud applause). This glorious victory is thus re- 
corded by one of Ireland's greatest poets, the illustrious and 
immortal Tom Davis: 

Thrice at the huts of Fontenoy the English column failed, 

And twice the lines of taint Antoine the Dutch in vain assailed; 

For town and slope were filled with fort and flanking battery. 

And well they swept the English ranks and Dutch auxiliary, 

As vainly through De Barre's wood the English soldiers burst, 

The Freneh artillery drove them back, diminished and dispersed. 

The bloody Duke of Cumberland beheld with anxious eye, 

And ordered up his last reserve his latest chance to try ; 

On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy ! how fast his generals ride! 

And mustering come his chosen troops, like clouds at eventide. 

Six thousand English veterans in stately column tread, 
Their cannon blaze in front and flank, Lord Hay is at their head; 
Steady they step a-down the slope — steady they climb the hill: 
Steady they load — steady they fire, moving right onward still, 
Betwixt the wood and Fontenoy, as through a furnace blast; 
Through rampart, trench and palisade and bullets showering fast, 
And on the open plain above they rose, and kept their course, 
With ready fire and grim resolve, that mocked at hostile force; 
Past Fontenoy, past Fontenoy ! while thinner grow their ranks — 
They break, as broke the Zuyder Zee through Holland's ocean banks. 

More idly than the summer flies, French tirailleurs rush round; 
As stubble to the lava tide, French squadrons strew the ground ; 
Bomb-shell and grape and round-shot tore, still on they marched and 
fired— 

Fast, from each volley, grenadier and voltigeur retired. 

" Push on, my household cavalry !" King Louis madly cried; 

To death they rush, but rude the shock — not unavenged they died. 

On through the camp the column trod — King Louis turns his rein; 

" Not yet, my liege," Saxe interposed, "the Irish troops remain;" 

And Fontenoy, famed Fontenoy, had been a Waterloo. 

Were not these exiles ready then, fresh, vehement and true ? 

"Lord Clare," he says, "you have your wish, there are your Saxon foes.* 

The Marshal almost smiles to see, so furiously he goes; 

How fierce the looks these exiles wear, who're wont to be so gay, 

The treasured wrongs of fifty years are in their hearts to-day— 

The treaty broken ere the ink wherewith 'twas writ could dry, 

Their plundered homes, their ruined shrines, their women's parting cry, 

Their priesthood hunted down like wolves, their country overthrown — 

Each looks as if revenge for all were staked on him alone. 

On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy! nor ever yet elsewhere, 

Rushed on to fight a nobler band than these proud exiles were. 

O'Brien's voice is heard with joy, as halting, he commands, 
" Fix bay'nets! " " Charge! " Like mountain storm, rush on these fiery 
bands. 

Thin is the English column now, and faint their volleys grow, 
21 



482 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



Yet, mustering all the strength they have, they make a gallant show, 
They dress their ranks upon the hill to face that battle wind — 
Their bayonets the breakers foam; like rocks the men behind! 
One volley crashes from their line, when, through the surging smoke, 
With empty guns clutched in their hands the headlong Irish broke. 
On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy! hark to that fierce huzza! 
"Kevenge! remember Limerick! dash down the Sassanach!" 

Like lions leaping at a fold, when mad with hunger's pang, 
Eight up against the English line the Irish exiles sprang; 
Bright was their steel, 'tis bloody now, their guns are filled with gore; 
Through shattered ranks, and severed files, and trampled flags they tore; 
The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, staggered, 
fled— 

The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead. 

Across the plain, and far away, passed on that hideous wrack, 

While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. 

On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy! like eagles in the sun, 

With bloody plumes the Irish stand — the field is ought and won. 

[Enthusiastic cheering. 

So did these exiles fight, serving in France, Spain and 
Austria, but the hope that kept them up was never realized. 
The French Revolution came and the Irish Brigade was utterly- 
dissolved. That French Revolution opened the way to the 
third great exodus of Irishmen. The Irish caught a ray of 
hope when the war-cry of freedom resounded upon the battle 
fields of Europe. The fever of the French Revolution spread 
to Ireland and created the insurrection of '98. But '98 and 
the men of '98 were extinguished in blood. Bravely they 
fought and well ; and if Sarsfield himself or the heroic Lord 
Clare, had been at New Ross or at the fight of Tara, upon 
the banks of the Boyne, when the ninety Wexford men fought 
a regiment of British dragoons, they would not have been 
ashamed of their countrymen. 

The year 1800 saw Ireland deprived of her Parliament, 
and from that day every honest Irishman who loved his coun- 
try felt there was an additional argument put upon him to 
turn his thoughts and his eyes to some other land. The mak- 
ing of her laws passed over to the English. They knew noth- 
ing about us. They had no regard for us. They wished, as 
their acts proved, to destroy the industry of Ireland. Some 
of the very first acts of the Parliament, when it was transfer- 
red to England, were destructive of the commerce and the 
trade of Ireland. Some of the very first things they did was 
to repeal the act of the glorious compact of 1782, when the 
Irish volunteers, with arms in their hands, were able to exact 
just laws and fair government from England. [Applause.] 

And now, Ireland turned her wistful eyes, and from her 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



483 



western cliffs she looked across the vast expanse of ocean, and 
far away cn the western main she beheld a new and a mighty 
country springing up, where the exile might find a home, 
where the free man could find air to breathe, and where the 
lover of his country would find a country worthy of his love. 
(Applause.) You might say that the emigration to America 
took shape form from the day that Ireland lost her legislative 
independence by the transfer of her Parliament to England. 
For, next to the privilege of loving his country, the dearest 
privilege a man can have, is a voice in his own government 
and the making of his laws. (Applause.) By the act of 
Union, a debased, corrupt and perjured Protestant Parlia- 
ment declared, in the eyes of the world, that Irishmen did not 
know how to make laws for themselves, and if they did not 
no one can blame Castlereagh for taking the making of their 
laws into his own hands. He was an Irishman, and he took 
the Legislative Assembly from Dublin, and transferred it to 
London ; but if he did, it was that very Assembly that voted 
its own transfer and its destruction. 

In vain did the glorious and immortal Henry Grattan — 
[applause] — thunder forth in the cause of justice and of Ire- 
land's nationality — in vain did every honest and honorable 
man in the land lift up hand and voice. It was all in vain. 
The corrupt legislature played into the hands of Pitt; and 
Castlereagh rejoiced in his honors, in his titles, and in his 
corruption, and went on rejoicing, increasing in power, in 
dignity and wealth, until, one fine morning, he drew the 
keen edge of a razor upon his own throat. (Applause.) He 
cut his jugular artery. He inflicted upon himself a tremend- 
ous inconvenience. [Laughter.] Whatever cause he had to 
fret in this world, I am greatly afraid he did not improve his 
condition by hurrying into the other. [Laughter and 
applause.] But the act that was too inconvenient to Castle- 
reagh was a great blessing to Ireland, to England, and to the 
whole world ; for it is a great blessing to this world when a 
scoundrel makes his bow and goes away. [Applause and 
laughter.] Well, my friends, it is not of these exiles, the 
exiles of '98, I speak, but of the exiles who went in the pre- 
ceding years, banished by Cromwell, to the number of one 
hundred thousand. Among them were two or three thous- 
an I priests of my Order. They were sent as slaves, and 
sold in Barbadoes and Jamaica, and there died in the sugar 
plantations. It was of these exiles of the earlier period that 
the poet, Campbell, wrote his famous verses on " The Exile 
of Erin." The allusions in that famous poem are to a period 



484 THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 

anterior to our own. He speaks of the Irish exile as one who 
played upon the harp. Now, up to about seventy years ago 
the harp was a common instrument in Ireland, and the aged 
harper lived down to the time of Carolin, who died a few 
years before the troubles of '98 began. We can, therefore, 
enter into the meaning of the poet, who thus describes our 
unfortunate countrymen, driven by force, by tyranny and 
oppression, from all that he loved and cherished upon this 
earth : 

There came to the beach a poor Exile of Erin, 
The dew on his thin robe was heavy and chill; 

For his country he sighed, when at twilight repairing 
To wander alone by the wind-beaten bill. 

But the day-star attracted his eye's sad devotion, 

For it rose o'er his own native isle of the ocean, 

Where once in the fire of his youthful emotion 
He sang the bold anthem of Erin-go-Bragh. 

Sad is my fate! said the heart-broken stranger; 

The wild deer and wolf to a covert can flee; 
But I have no refuge from famine and danger: 

A home and a country remain not to me. 
Never again in the green sunny bowers, 
"Where my forefathers lived, shall I spend those sweet hours, 
Or cover my harp with the wild-woven flowers, 

And strike to the numbers of Erin-go-Bragh. 

Erin, my country, though sad and forsaken, 

In my dreams I revisit thy sea-beaten shore; 
But alas! in a far foreign land I awaken, 

And sigh for the friends who can meet me no more! 
Oh, cruel fate! wilt thou never replace me 
In a mansion of peace, where no perils can chase me ? 
Never again shall my brothers embrace me — 

They died to defend me, or live to deplore! 

Where is my cabin-door, fast by the wild-wood ? 

Sisters and sire : did ye weep for its fall ? 
Where is the mother that looked on my childhood ? 

And where is the bosom-friend, dearer than all ? 
Oh, my sad heart, long abandoned by pleasure, 
Why did it doat on a fast-fading treasure ? 
Tears, like the rain-drop, may fall without measure, 

But rapture and beauty they cannot recall. 

Yet all its sad recollection suppressing, 

One dying wish my lone bosom can draw: 
Erin, an exile bequeaths thee his blessing! 

Land of my forefathers, Erin-go-Bragh! 
Buried and cold, when my heart stills her motion, 
Green be thy fields, sweetest isle of the ocean, 
And thy harp-striking bards sing aloud with devotion: 

Erin, mavourneen — Erin-go-Bragh! 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



485 



A* the first of these exodi was of faith, that that fafth 
might be scattered and disseminated throughout the earth ; 
as the second of these vast emigrations was that of the war- 
rior going forth full of hope — hope that was never realized — 
so the third vast emigration of Ireland was an emigration of 
love ; it was the tearing of loving hearts from all that they 
cherished and from all that they loved in this world. The in- 
justice of the tyrannical land-possessor in Ireland, the unjust 
and wicked government of England, gloated over their hellish 
work. The people are torn from their homes and flung in 
ditches, to die like the dogs. There is no law to protect them 
— no right of theirs to be asserted. They had no right, ex- 
cept to suffer, to be ejected, and to die. Oh ! who among us 
has ever seen the parting of the old man and his sons and his 
daughters ? — who among us that has ever heard the loud, 
heart-breaking cry that came forth when these loving hearts 
were separated, can forget these things ? The youth of Ire- 
land fled — the bone and sinew of Ireland fled, and many an 
old man remained in the land, and sat down upon the family 
grave to die of a broken heart. But one emotion, one glo- 
rious passion ruled the emigrant saint of fourteen hundred 
years ago, the emigrant warrior of two hundred years ago, 
and the emigrant love of the present day — one glorious feel- 
ing, one absorbing passion, and that was love for Ireland. 
(Applause.) 

My friends, hear the lament of St. Columbkille, one of 
Ireland's greatest poets and greatest saints. He banished 
himself in penance to the far distant island of Iona ; but he 
tells us that whenever he wished to calm the sorrow of his 
heart, he would go and sit upon the high rocks of the sea- 
shore, and turn his eyes to the West to catch a glimpse of the 
shores of Ireland. " Death," he exclaims in one of his poems, 
" in glorious Ireland is better than life without end in Albion. 
What joy to float upon the white-crested sea, and to watch 
the waves break upon the Irish shore ! Ah ! how my boat 
would float if its bow were turned to my Irish oak grove ; but 
the sea now carries me only to Albion — a land of strangers. 
My foot is in my little boat, but my sad heart ever bleeds. 
There is a gray eye that ever turns to Erin, but never, in this 
life, shall it ever see Erin, nor her sons, nor her daughters 
again. From the highway I look over the sea, and tears are 
in my gray eyes when I turn to Erin, where the song of the 
birds is so sweet, and where the monks sing like the birds ; 
where the young are so gentle and the old so wise ; where 
the great men are so noble to look at, and the women so fair 



486 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



to wed. Young traveller," he says to one of his disciples, ? 
noble youth who was returning to Ireland, * carry my sorrows 
with thee ; carry them to Ireland ; noble youth, take my 
prayer with thee and my blessing. One thought — for Ireland 
— may she be blessed. The other for Albion. Carry my 
blessings across the sea, to the West. My heart is broken in 
my bosom, and if death should come upon me suddenly, it 
will be because of my great love for Erin." The only con- 
solation that was vouchsafed to him was a vision from God. 
He beheld the future, and saw that many hundred years after 
his death, his body would be carried back to Ireland, to rest 
forever in the soil he loved. This prophecy he himself an- 
nounced in these words : " They shall bury me first at Iona, 
but with the will of the living God, it is at Down that I shall 
rest in my grave, with Patrick and with Bridget — three 
bodies in one grave." And so, in the tenth century, when 
the Danes swept over Iona, the monks of Iona took St. Co- 
lumbkille's venerated body, they brought it to Ireland, and 
they laid it in the cathedral at Down ; and there, as the old 
poem tells us, 

" Three saints, one grave do fill — 
Patrick, and Bridget, and Columbkille." 

The love that he had for Ireland, was the spirit common 
to all of Ireland's saints, and while they were crowned with the 
highest dignities of the church in foreign lands, still, as we 
have the record of history written by Aidan, the first bishop 
of Northumbria, the founder of the famous Lindi-farne Mon- 
astery, if they wished to enjoy themselves a little, they came 
together and they celebrated in the Irish language, in sweet- 
est verse to the sound of timbrel and of harp, the praises 
of their dear native land. Nor less was the love that the 
brave exile of 1691 bore to Ireland. 

We read that when the cry of battle came forth, and the 
shock of the armies met on the battle-field, never did the 
stout heart of the Saxon soldier melt with fear within him, 
until the wild Irish hurrah rang forth as they dashed upon 
their enemy. (Applause.) 

And thus did these people leave their dear native land— 
these noble chieftains and brave soldiers of Ireland. Their 
love is commemorated in the poet's verse : 

The mess tent is full and the glasses are set, 

And the gallant Count Thomond is President yet, 

The veteran arose like an uplifted lance, 

Crying, "Comrades, a health to the monarch of France." 

With bumpers and cheers they have done as he bade, 

For King Louis is loved by the Irish Brigade. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



48* 



"A health to King James," and they bent as they quaffed, 
" Here's to George the Elector," and fiercely they laughed, 
" Good luck to the girls we wooed long ago, 
Where Shannon and Barrow and Blackwater flow, 
God prosper old Ireland," (you'd think I am afraid) 
So pale grow the chiefs of the Irish Brigade. 

"But surely that light cannot come from our lamp, 

And that noise— are they all getting drunk in the camp?" 
"Hurrah! boys, the morning of battle is come. 

And the gen-rale's beating on many a drum," 

So they rush from the revel to join the parade: 

For the van is the right of the Irish Brigade. 

They fought as they revelled, fast, fiery and true, 
And, though victors, they left on the field not a few; 
And they who survived, fought and drank as of yore, 
But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more: 
For in far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade, 
Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade. 

(Loud applause. 

Nor does the Irishman of to-day, whether a voluntary or 
involuntary exile from the green isle of the ocean, shame the 
love of the saint and the love of the warrior for Ireland. It 
is not, perhaps, the green hillside, crowned with the Irish oak, 
and made so beautiful with its fields of waving corn, that 
rises before our minds and excites the tenderest emotions of 
our hearts. It was not the beauty of Avoca that inspired 
the poet — 

It was not that nature had shed o'er the scene 
Her purest of crystal, her brightest of green; 
It was not the soft magic of streamlet and rill — 
Oh, no, it was something more exquisite still. 
It was that the friends of my bosom were near, 
That made every scene of enchantment more dear. 
And who felt that the best charms of nature improve 
"When we see them reflected from looks that we love. 

And so, it is not, perhaps, the material beauty of Ireland, 
it is not the green hillside; it is not perhaps the crystal brook 
running from the mill-pond through the green field in the 
midst of which stands the old ruined abbey, around which 
we played in our youth ; it is not so much these that com- 
mand our love, but it is the holy and tender associations of 
all that we first learned to love, and of all that we first 
learned to venerate — the pure-minded, the holy, gentle and 
loving mother, the wise, brave and considerate father, the 
young friend upon whom we leaned and whose friendship 
was to us the earliest joy of our life, the venerable priest 
whose smile we sought as we bowed our youthful heads — ■ 



488 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



(applause) — these and such as these are the motives of oar 
iove for Ireland, and that love is as keen and strong in the 
heart of the Irishman far away from his native land to-day, 
as it was in the heart of St. Columbkille, and in the breasts 
of the Irish Brigade when they rose to toast their heroic 
mother-land. (Applause.) Well, is the lament of the Irish 
exile of to-day described and depicted in the beautiful verses 
of the poet : 

Adieu! the snowy sail 
Swells her bosom to the gale, 
And our barque from Innisfail 
Bounds away. 

"While we gaze upon thy shore, 
That we never shall see more, 
And the blinding tears flow o'er. 
We pray! 

Mavourneen! be thou long 
In peace, the queen of song — 
In battle proud and strong 
As the sea! 

Be saints thine offspring still; 
True heroes guard each hill, 
And harps by every rill 

Sound free. 

Tho' round her Indian bowers, 
The hand of nature showers 
The brightest blooming flowers 
Of our sphere! 

Yet not the richest rose 
In an alien clime that blows, 
Like the brier at home that grows, 
Is so dear! 

Though glowing breasts may be 
In soft vales beyond the sea; 
Yet ever, grah-ma-chree, 

Shall I wail: 

For the heart of love I leave, 
In the dreary hours of eve, 
On thy stormy shore to grieve, 
Innisfail! 

But memory o'er the deep, 
On her dewy wing shall sweep, 
When in midnight hours I weep, 
O'er thy wrongs: 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



489 



And bring me steeped in tears, 
The dead flowers of other years, 
And waft unto my ears, 

Home's songs. 

When I slumber in the gloom 
Of a nameless foreign tomb, 
By a distant ocean's boom, 
Innisfail! 

Around thy emerald shore 
May the clasping sea adore, 
And each wave in thunder roar, 
"All hail!" 

And when the final sigh 
Shall "bear my soul on high, 
And on chainless wing I fly 

Through the blue: 

Earth's latest thought shall be, 
As I soar above the sea — 
"Green Erin, dear, to thee — 
Adieu!" 

Yes, if there be one passion that outlives every other in 
the heart of the true Irishman, it is the inborn love for Ire- 
land, for Ireland's greatness and glory. Our fathers loved 
it, and knew how to prize it and to hold it. The glory of a 
faith that never has been tarnished, and the glory of a 
national honor that has never bowed itself down to acknowl- 
edge itself a slave, is yours. [Applause.] The burden and 
the responsibility of that glory is yours and mine this night. 
The glory of the Irish priesthood, the glory of Columba, the 
glory of Iona of Landisfarne, are upon me with a tremendous 
responsibility to- day beyond all other men — what the Irish 
priest must be, because of that glorious history. [Applause.] 
The glory of the battle that has been so long fought, and is 
not yet closed — [thunders of applause] — the glory of a faith 
that has been so long and so well defended, the glory of our 
national virtue that has made Ireland's men the bravest and 
Ireland's women the purest in the world — [loud and prolonged 
applause] — that glory is your inheritance and your responsi- 
bility to-night. And of all other men, both as Irishmen and 
Catholics, you and I together are bound to show the world 
that Irishmen have been in ages past what they intend to be 
in ages to come — a nation and a church that has never 
allowed a stain to be fixed upon the national banner nor 
upon the national altar — a nation and a church that, in spite 
of its hard fate and its misfortunes, can still look the world 
21* 



490 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



in the face, for on Ireland's virgin brow no stain of dishonor 
or perfidy has ever been placed. [Enthusiastic applause.] 
In sobriety, in industry, in manly self-respect, in honest 
pride of everything that an honest man ought to be proud 
of, in all these, and in respect for the laws of this mighty 
country, lies the secret of your honor and of your national 
purity. [Applause.] Mark my words : Let Ireland in 
America be faithful, be Catholic, be practical, be temperate, 
be industrious, be obedient to law, and the day will dawn, 
with the blessing of God, upon you and me, when returning 
to visit, after a time, the land from which we came, we shall 
land upon a free, a glorious and an unfettered nation. 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 



[A Discourse delivered by the Rev. Father Burke, in the Domini- 
can Church, New York, on Easter Sunday.] 

"the resurrection." 



'* And when the Sabbath was passed, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, 
the mother of James and Salome, brought sweet spices, that, coming, 
they might anoint Jesus. And very early in the morning, the first day 
of the week, they came to the sepulchre, the sun being now risen. And 
they said to one another, Who shall roll us back the stone from the 
door of the sepulchre ? And, looking, they saw the stone rolled back ; 
for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre they saw a 
young man sitting on the right side, clothed with a white robe. And 
they were astonished. And he said to them : Be not affrighted. You 
seek Jesus of Xazareth, who "was crucified. He is risen, He is not here. 
Behold the place where they laid Him. But, go ; tell His disciples, 
and Peter, that He goeth before you into Galilee. There you shall see 
Him, as He told you." 

My Dear Brethren : "We are told, in the history of 
the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, which we have been 
considering during the past few days — that after our Saviour 
had yielded up His spirit upon the cross, Joseph of Arima- 
thea went to Pilate and demanded the body of the Lord. 
Pilate was surprised to hear that our Divine Lord was already 
dead. And yet, if he had only consulted his own memory, 
and remembered how the life was almost scourged out of the 
Saviour by the hands of the soldiers, it would not have 
seemed to him so wonderful that the three hours of agony 
Should have closed that life. He sent to inquire if He was 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



491 



already dead ; and gave orders that, in case he was dead, 
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were to take possession 
of his body. They came sorrowing, and again climbed the 
Hill of Calvary ; and lest there might be any doubt that the 
Master was dead, the soldier drove his lance once through 
the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the body was 
taken down from the cross. They took out the nails, gently 
and tenderly ; and they handed them down, and they were 
put into the hands of the Virgin Mother. They took the 
body reverently from its high gibbet, and laid the thorned- 
crowned head upon the bosom of the Virgin, who waited to 
receive it. TVith her own hands she removed these thorns 
from His brow; and the fountain of tears, that had been 
dried up because of the greatness of her sorrow, flows now, 
and rains the Virgin's tears upon the stained and disfigured 
face of her child. Then they brought Him to a garden in 
the neighborhood ; and there they laid Him in the tomb. It 
was another man's grave ; and He, the Lord, had no right to 
it. But he died so poor, that, even in death, He had no place 
whereon to lay His head, until charity opened another man's 
tomb for Him. There they laid Him down ; and, covered 
with blood and with wounds — all disfigured and deformed, 
they laid Him down, like the patriarch of old, with a stone 
for His pillow ; and upon that stone they laid the wounded 
and blessed head of the Lord. They closed the sepulchre. 

Mary, the Mother, gathered up the thorns, the nails, the 
instruments with which her child was so cruelly maimed and 
put to death ; and with them pressed to her heart, and lean- 
ing upon her newly-found son, she returned to her sad home 
in Jerusalem ; and all, having adored, silently dispersed ; for 
the evening was coming, that brought the Sabbath. Only 
one remained. The heart-broken Magdalen lay down outside 
the tomb, and laid her head upon the stone which they had 
rolled against the Master's grave. There she knew He lay ; 
and the instinct of her love, and of her sorrow, was so strong 
that she could not go away from the tomb of her Lord, but 
remained there, weeping and alone. TVhile she wept, evening 
deepened into night ; and alone, the heart-broken lover of 
Jesus Christ saw that she must rise and depart. She rose. 
She kissed, again and again, that great stone that enclosed 
her Divine Saviour ; and, turning to the city, she heard the 
heavy, measured tread of the soldiers, who came with the 
night to guard the tomb. They closed around the tomb, 
With rudeness and with violence they drove the woman away 
■ — wondering at her tears and the evidence of her broken heart. 



492 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



And then, piling their arms and their spears, they settled down 
to the night-watch, cautioned not to sleep — cautioned to take 
care not to let a human being come near that grave until the 
morning light. Excited by their own superstitious fears and 
emotions (for it was indeed a strange office for these warriors 
to be set on guard over a dead man), agitated by the strange- 
ness of their position, excited by their fears, they slept not ; 
but, waiting the night, watchfully, diligently, and with vigil- 
ance, they guard on the right hand and on the left ; scarcely 
knowing who was to come ; fearing with an undefined fear ; 
thinking that, perhaps, it was to be a phantom, a spirit, an 
evil thing of the night coming upon them ; and ever ready to 
grasp their arms, and put themselves on their defence. 

The night fell, deep and heavy, over the tomb of Jesus 
Christ. The whole of that night, and of the following day, 
they kept their watch. Mary, the mother, was in Jerusalem. 
Kneeling before these instruments of the Passion, she spent 
the whole of that night, and the whole of the following Sab- 
bath-day, weeping over those thorns and over those nails ; 
contemplating them, examining them, and seeing, from the 
evidence of the blood that was upon them, how deeply they 
had been struck into the brow, and into the hands and feet of 
Jesus, her divine child ; her heart breaking within her, as 
every glance at these terrible instruments of the Passion 
brought up all the horrors which she had witnessed on that 
morning of Friday, on the Mount of Calvary. The woman 
kept watch and ward round her, and so terrible was the moth- 
er's grief, that even the Magdalen was silenced and hushed 
and dared not obtrude one word of consolation upon the Vir- 
gin's ear. 

The Sabbath passed away. Dull and heavy the black 
cloud that had settled over Calvary and over Jerusalem, was 
lifted up. Men walked about with fear and with trembling. 
The sun seemed to have scarcely risen that Sabbath morning. 
The dead, who started from their graves the moment Jesus 
gave his last cry on the cross, flitted in the darkening night 
to and fro in the silent streets of Jerusalem. Men beheld 
the awful vision of these skeleton bodies that rose from the 
grave. A fire of vengeance and of fury seemed to glare in 
the empty sockets in their heads. They showed their white 
teeth, gnashing, as it would seem, over the crime that the 
people had committed. They flitted to and fro. All Jerusa- 
lem was filled with fear and terror. ISTo man spoke above his 
breath, and all was silent during that long Sabbath-day, that 
brought no joy, because the people had called down the blood 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



493 



of the Saviour upon their heads. The Sabbath day and even- 
ing had closed, and again night was recumbent upon the 
earth. The guard is relieved. Fresh soldiers are put at the 
doors. They are again cautioned that this is the important 
night when they must watch with redoubled vigilance, be- 
cause this night will seal the Redeemer's fate. He said, " I 
will rise again in three days ;" and if the morning sun of the 
first day of the week — the Sunday — rise upon the undisturbed 
grave of the dead man, then all that He had preached was a 
lie, and all the wonders that He wrought were a deception 
upon the people. Therefore the guards were trebly cautioned 
to keep watch. Then, filled with fear and with an undefined 
alarm, they close around the sepulchre, resolved that so long 
as hands of theirs can wield a spear, no human being shall ap- 
proach that grave. The Magdalen lingered round, fascinated 
by the knowledge that her Redeemer and her Lord was there 
in that tomb which she was not allowed to approach. And 
the guards watched patiently, vigilantly, with sleepless eyes; 
and the night came down and all the city was silent and 
darkened. Hour followed hour. Slowly and silently time 
rolls away. The night was deepening to its deepest gloom. 
The midnight hour approached. The moment comes when 
the third day in the tomb is accomplished. The moment 
comes when the Sabbath was over — the Sabbath of which it 
was written, that "the Lord rested on the seventh day from 
all His works." That Sabbath had Jesus Christ made in that 
dreary, silent tomb. Wounds and blood were upon Him. 
The weakness of death had fastened upon Him. Those life- 
less limbs cannot move. The sightless eyes cannot open to 
behold the light of day. Death, indeed, seems to have rioted 
in its triumph over the Eternal Lord of Life, and hell ap- 
pears victorious in the destruction of the victim. The mid- 
night hour approaches. The guards hear the rustling of the 
coming storm. They see the trees bow their heads in that 
garden, and wave to and fro, as by a violent trembling. They 
see them bending as if a storm was sweeping over them. 
Tiny look. What is this orient light that blushes upon the 
horizon ? What is this light which bursts upon them, bright, 
bright as the sun of heaven, bright as ten thousand suns r 
And while the light flashes upon them, and, dazzled, they 
close their eyes, they hear a riot of voices : " Gloria in eo> 
celsis ! Alleluia to the risen Saviour !" What is this that 
they behold ? The great stone comes rolling back from the 
mouth of the monument into the midst of them ! Save your- 
selves, O men ! Save yourselves or it will crush you ! The 



494 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



men are frightened and alarmed. Is it the power of heaven 
Or is it a force from hell ? Presently, forth from that toinli 
bursts the glorified and risen Saviour. Their eyes are daz« 
zled with the spectacle of the Man that lay in that cold, dark, 
silent grave. A voice was heard : " Arise, for I am come foi 
Thee !" And the glorified soul of the Saviour, entering that 
moment into His body, bursts triumphant from the grave ! 
Death and hell fiy from before His face. Fly, for a power is 
here that you cannot command ! Fly, you demons, who re- 
joiced in your triumph, for Death and Hell are conquered. 
Arise, glorious sun, from the tomb ! Oh, what do I behold ? 
Where, O Saviour, is the sign of Thy agony ? Where is the 
disfigurement of blood ? Where is the sign of the execution- 
er's hand upon Thee ? It is gone — gone ! No longer the 
blood-stained thorn defiles Thy brows ! No longer Thy 
sacred flesh hanging torn from the bones ! No ! But now, 
triumphant, glorified, incorruptible, impassible, He has re- 
sumed the grandeur and the glory which He put away from 
Him on the day of His incarnation, and He rises from the 
tomb, the conqueror of Death and Hell, the God and Re- 
deemer of the world ! 

Behold, my brethren, how sorrow is changed into joy! 
Bursting forth in the light of His divinity, He went His way 
— the way of His eternity. The mountains, the hills of 
Judea — of Jerusalem — bowed down before Him. The moun- 
tains moved and rocked on their bases before the assertion 
of Thy sovereignty, O God ! He went His way, and left be- 
hind Him an empty grave, and the clothing in which His dis- 
figured body had been wrapped up. An empty grave ! But 
all the angels in Heaven were looking on at that moment. 
At that moment, when the face of the glorified Saviour burst 
from the grave, all the angels of Heaven put forth alleluias 
of joy and of praise. The heart of the Father in Heaven 
exulted. Rising from His eternal throne, He sent forth a 
cry of joy over the glory of His Son. All the angels in 
Heaven exulted ; and, triumphing, they came down to earth, 
and gazed upon the sacred spot wherein their Master and 
their God had lain. 

The morning came, and the dark clouds had disappeared. 
The very brows of Olivet seemed to shine with a solemn 
gladness, and the cedars of Lebanon seemed to lift their 
heads with a new instinct of life — almost of love and joy. 
Calvary itself seemed to rejoice. The morning rose, and the 
sun gladly came up from his home in the east, and his firist 
rays fell upon the empty grave. And behold the Magdalen, 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



495 



and the other followers of our Lord, coming with ointment 
and sweet spices to anoint Him. They came ; and question- 
ing — as we have seen — questioning each other. How could 
Mary, with nothing but her woman's strength, how could 
Mary move that stone ? But see; it is moved. And beneath 
they behold an angel of God. His light fills the tomb. 
There is no darkness there, no sign of sadness, no sign of 
death. Robed in transparent white — even as the garments 
of our Lord shone upon Tabor — so did he shine as he kept 
guard over the deathbed of his Lord and Master. Then, 
speaking to the woman he says: "Woman, whom seekest 
thou?" "Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified." "Why 
seekest thou the living among the dead ? He is not here. 
He is risen ! " And then their hearts were filled with a 
mighty joy ; for the Master is risen ; while the soldiers, 
frightened and crestfallen, went into Jerusalem, proclaiming 
the appearance to the Pharisees and to the people, and that 
He whom they were set to guard was the Lord of light and 
life, and the Son of God. 

The eyes that were oppressed with the weariness of death, 
are now lifted up, shining in the glory of His resurrection. 
The hands that were nailed helplessly to the cross, now wield 
the omnipotence of God. The heart that was broken and 
oppressed, now enters into the mighty ocean of the ages of 
His divinity, undisturbed, unfettered, unencumbered by any 
sorrow. " Christ, risen from the dead, dies no more. Death 
has no dominion over him." He died once, and He died for 
sin. " Therefore," says St. Augustine, " by dying on Calvary- 
He showed that He was man ; by rising from His grave lie 
proved that He was God." 

If, therefore, dearly beloved brethren, during the past forty 
days the Church has called upon us for fasting and mortifica- 
tion, has called upon us to chastise our bodies and humble 
our souls (" humilidbam in jejunio cmimam meam") "In my 
fast I will humble my soul" — if the Church during the past 
weeks called upon us to be afflicted, and to shed our tears at 
the feet of Jesus crucified — if we have done this — above all, 
if we have purified our souls so as to let His light, and His 
glory, and His grace into our hearts — to-day, have we a right- 
to rejoice ; and the message which I bring to you is a mes- 
sage of exceeding great joy. Christ is risen ! The Cruci- 
fied has risen from the grave ! Weakness has clothed itself 
with strength. Ignominy hath clothed itself with glory. 
Death has been absorbed in victory, and the powers of hell 
are crushed and confounded forevermore. Is not this a meg- 



496 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



sage of great joy and triumph? And truly I may say to 
you, in the words of St. Paul, " Gaudete in Domino iter um 
dico gaudete" — " Rejoice, therefore, in the Lord! I say to 
you again, rejoice ! " 

Two reasons have we for our Easter joy and gladness. 
Two reasons have we for our great rejoicing. First of all, 
that of the friend to behold the glory of his friend ; the joy 
of a disciple to see the glory of his Master : a joy centring 
in Jesus Christ — rejoicing in Him and with Him, for His own 
6ake. Was it not for His own sake we sorrowed ? Was it 
not because of His grief and suffering we shed our tears and 
cast ourselves down before Him ? So, also, for His own sake, 
let us rejoice. We rejoice to behold our God reassuming the 
glory of His divinity, and so participate that glory to His 
sacred humanity that the sunshine of the eternal light of 
God streams out from every member, sense, and limb of tho 
eacred body of Jesus Christ our Lord. Pure light it seemed. 
With the transparency of Heaven it assumed all its splendor. 
All the glory wa» within Him in Almighty affluence, and 
sent itself forth so that He was truly not only the light of 
grace for the world but the light of glory. For this must 
every true believer in Jesus Christ rejoice. 

But the second cause of our joy is for our own sake ; for, 
although we grieve for Him and sorrow for Him, for His own 
sake, upon Calvary, we also grieve for ourselves. And it is, 
for us, the keenest and the bitterest sorrow that the work of 
Calvary was the work of our doing by our sins ; that if we 
were not what we were, He would never have been what He 
was on that Friday morning ; that for us He bared His 
innocent bosom to receive all the sorrows and all the agonies 
of His Passion ; that for us did He expose His virgin body 
to that fearful scourging and terrible crucifixion ; that for 
our sins did He languish upon the cross ; that they put upon 
Him the burden of the iniquities of us all; and "He was 
afflicted for our iniquities and was bruised for our sins." It 
is for our own sorrows and for our own sins that the very 
deepest sorrow has a place in the Crucifixion. Well did He 
— He, who permitted that we should be the cause of His 
sorrow — wish us, also, for our own sake, to participate in His 
joy. And why? Because the resurrection of Jesus from 
the dead was not only the proof of His divinity, the estab- 
lishment of His truth, the conviction of His miracles, the 
foundation of His religion, but it was, moreover, the type and 
model of the glorious resurrection that awaits every man who 
dies in the love, and fear, and grace of Jesus Christ. Every 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



497 



man who preserves his soul pure, and every man who restores 
to his soul the purity of repentance — to every such man is 
promised the glory of the resurrection, like unto that of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. For as Christ rose from the dead, so 
shall we rise ; and as He clothed Himself with glory, so shall 
we pass from glory unto glory — to see Christ in the air — to 
be like unto Him in glory ; and so shall we be with the Lord 
forever. And that glory which comes to our Lord to-day, 
comes not only to His grand soul returning surrounded by 
the saints whom He had delivered from their prison, but it 
comes also to His body, wiping away and erasing every stain, 
every defilement, every wound, and communicating to thai 
body the attributes of the spirit; for "that which was laid 
down in dishonor rose in glory" — that which was laid down 
in weakness rose in power — that which was laid down sub- 
ject to grief, if not to corruption, rose a spiritual and incor- 
ruptible body. Even so shall we rise — for I announce to you 
a wonderful thing, that when the angels sound the trumpet, 
and call the dead to judgment, they that are in Christ shall 
rise first ; and as the soul of the Redeemer went back to the 
tomb, and entered into His body, to make that body shine in 
its spiritual glory — so shall our souls return from the heights 
of heavenly contemplation to find these bodies again — to re- 
enter them — and to make them shine with the glory of God, 
if we only consent to live and die in the grace and favor of 
Jesus Christ. 

The eyes that now cannot look upon the sun in heaven 
without being blinded, these very eyes can gaze upon the 
face of God and not be blinded by His majesty. The ears 
that now weary of the music of earth shall be so attuned to 
the music of Heaven that the rapture of its hearing shall con- 
tinue in all the ecstacy of delight, so long as God is God. 
The heart, now so circumscribed as scarcely to be able to rise 
to the dignity of the highest form of human love — v 7 ill then 
be so purified and exalted that it will be filled with the fair- 
est forms of divine love — purified, sanctified, animating every 
natural sentiment, every affection, until the body, growing 
into the soul's essence, shall all become spiritual and, as it were, 
divine. In a word, this gross, corruptible, material body of 
ours shall be so spiritualized — so glorified — so refined, as t > 
be capable of the most exquisite pleasure of every spiritual 
sense ; and yet pleasures purifying to the soul, in which every 
thought and every power of the soul and body shall be 
wrapped up into God. 

But mark, dear brethren : the resurrection of our Lord is 



498 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



the pledge and promise that every soul shall realize; but two 
things are necessary in order to arrive at this glory. Two 
conditions are laid down in order to attain to this wonderful 
fulfilment of all the love of the redemption of Jesus Christ. 
And these two things are : First of all, we must keep a pure 
soul and a pure conscience. Mark how Jesus Christ came to 
His glory ; He took a human heart, He took a human soul, 
He took a human conscience — for He was true man. But He 
took every element of His humanity from a source so pure, so 
limpid, so holy, that in heaven or on earth, nothing was ever 
seen or ever shall be seen until the end of eternity, that shall 
be compared with the Blessed Virgin's son. Throughout His 
whole life of thirty-three years, nothing in it could have the 
slightest shadow of sin — nothing that could have the slight- 
est feature of sin upon it, ever was allowed to come near the 
blessed and most immaculate soul and heart of Jesus Christ. 
When at last He permitted the appearance of the sin that was 
not His own to come upon Him — to touch Him nearly — it so 
frightened Him — it so horrified Him — that the blood burst, 
as we know, from every pore of His body. It seemed as if 
His body, as it' were, could not stand the sight ; His was the 
grace of purity. Oh, my beloved brethren, that we might 
attain to that self-same purity, as far as our nature will permit 
us, that we might only know the beauty of that purity beam 
ing from Him as its author and creator ! Christ, our Lord, 
laid out in His Church the path of purity, the path of inno 
cence. 

But for all those who fall, or stumble, or turn aside for a 
moment, He has built another royal road to salvation, namely, 
the road of penance. One or other of these must we tread ; 
whether we tread the way of purity, or the way of penance, 
we must suffer with Christ if we wish to be purified with 
Him. But mark ! All pure and holy as He was — infinite 
purity and holiness itself — no passion to disturb Him — no 
evil example to exercise its influence over Him — no secret 
emotion of pleasure, even of that purely human pleasure, to 
come and interfere in the remotest degree with the perfect 
union with His divinity — yet, with all this, He mortified that 
sacred body ; He fasted ; He humbled Himself ; He prayed ; 
and He ended by giving that body to be scourged and to be 
crucified ! He shed His blood. What an example was this ! 
That body of Jesus Christ was no impediment to His holi- 
ness. It only helped Him ; for it was the instrument of His 
divine will in the salvation of man. Our bodies, on the 
other hand, impede us every day, and put between us and 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



499 



God. Every passion that dwells within us, rises from time 
to time to separate us from God. Every appetite that clam- 
ors for enjoyment would fain destroy the soul forever, for a 
momentary pleasure. Every sense that brings thought and 
idea to the spirit, brings also in its train the imminent, the 
Oangerons, the poisonous image of the evil example of sin. 
That which, with Christ, was a work of pleasure, is, with us, 
a work of toil. It is toil to deny ourselves somewhat — to 
put the sign of the cross, in penance and mortification, upon 
this flesh — to enter somewhat into the sufferings of our Lord 
— into His fasting — into His prayer — into His mortification— 
in order that our bodies may be chastened ; for it is only 
chastened bodies that can contain pure and sinless souls. 
Those who are pure must chastise their bodies somewhat — 
must deny themselves — in order to preserve their purity. 
Those who are penitent must do it in order to appease the 
justice of God upon that body which has led them away, 
some time or other, from God by sin, and so tended to 
destroy the soul. And this is the reason why the Catholic 
Church commands us to fast ; that it tells us we must not 
enjoy over much the pleasures of the theatre; the pleasures 
of gay and festive reunions. It tells us that we must, from 
time to time, be hungry, and yet not taste food — that we 
must be thirsty, and yet refuse to refresh ourselves for a time 
with drink. And this, not only that these bodies may be 
chastened for a time, but transformed into fitness for the 
glory of Heaven. And here I would remark that while every 
other religion, while every false religion, puts away sadness 
and sorrow, puts away the precept of fasting, and says that 
men may pander to, and feed, and cherish their bodies, 
the Catholic Church, alone, from the very first day of its 
existence, drew the sword of the spirit — the sword of mortifi- 
cation — and declares through her monks, through her her- 
mits through her virgins, through her priesthood, that the 
body must be subdued, it must be abased, it must be chas- 
tened, in order that the soul may rise so God by purity and 
grace here, and through them, to the spiritual glory of the 
resurrection hereafter. 

I say there is a third motive for our joy this morning — 
and it is this : May I, dearly beloved, in this which I may call 
the closing day of our Lent — may I congratulate those whom 
I see before me ! The constant attendance of many among 
you during the last forty evenings of Lent has made your 
faces familiar to me. Over these Catholic countenances have 
I seen from time to time the expression — now, of sorrow— 



500 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION. 



now, of delight— but, whether of sorrow or of joy, of sympa- 
thy with Jesus Christ. Of this am I a witness, and on this 
do I congratulate you. If it be true that the Christian man 
is indeed a man in whom Christ lives, according to the words 
of the Apostle, " I live no longer, I, but Christ lives within 
me" — then, according to his words you are lost to yourselves; 
you are dead ; and your life is hidden with Christ in God, if 
then, the Christian man be the man in whom Christ lives, 
well may I congratulate you upon every emotion of joy and 
of sorrow that has passed through your hearts and over youi 
faces during these forty blessed days that you have passed : 
because these emotions were the gift of Christ, and the evi- 
dence of the life of Christ in you, and of your familiarity 
with Christ's image. 

May I congratulate you on a good confession and a fervent 
communion ? May I, in heart and spirit, bow down before 
every man among you to-day, as a man who holds in his bosom 
Jesus Christ ; as a man whose heart is not an empty tomb, 
like that in the garden outside Jerusalem ; not occupied 
merely by an angel, but whose heart is the sanctuary wherein 
the risen and glorified Saviour dwells this morning ? May I 
congratulate you on this ? I hope so ! I hope that the words 
that have been heard here have not been spoken in vain. It 
would fill me with fear if I thought there was one among the 
audience who filled this church during the last Lent, whose 
hardened heart refused to make his Easter confession and 
communion ; and to make it as the beginning of a series of 
more frequent — and, if possible, of monthly confessions and 
communions. It would fill me with fear if I thought there 
was such a one here ; because then there would come upon 
me the conviction that it was my own unworthiness — my own 
unfitness — my own weakness that made the Word fall fruit- 
less on my lips, and, perhaps, make me a reprobate while I 
was preaching the Word. But, no ! Nay, I will rather pre- 
sume that God has done His own work — that the Divine Hus- 
bandman, who placed the seed of His Word in such hands as 
mine — most unworthy — that He has made that Word spring 
up, and that the fairest flowers of grace and sanctity already 
crown it in your hearts to-day. Upon this, therefore, I con- 
gratulate you as the third motive of your joy; that not only 
is the Saviour glorified in Jerusalem, but he is glorified in 
your hearts. Not only has He conquered death in the Garden 
of Gethsemane, but He has conquered death in your souls. 
Not only has he driven the devil and all the powers of hell 
before Him, as He burst from the tomb, but He has driven 



THE CATHOLIC MISSION". 501 

him from your hearts, into which he has entered this morning. 
Oh, brethren, keep him ! Keep Him as your best and only 
friend ! Keep Him as you would keep the pledge of that 
future glory which is to come, and of which, says the Apostle, 
" Eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard ; nor hath it en- 
tered into the heart of man to conceive — what things the 
Lord God of heaven hath prepared for these who cease not to 
love Him 1 " 



LIBRARY C>B=^^JOWWgg«^^^S^ * 

028 310 025 A 



A 



Jr 



